Published on Wednesday December 6th, 2023.
<aside> 📢 After alerting Nostra of this investigation (on December 2nd, 2023), they very quickly (within hours) altered website imagery, copy, changed technical methods of bot targeting, and even renamed a product.
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This research was carried out as a joint-collaboration between The Nice Agency and Proton, with participation from various current and former Nostra customers. All research was reviewed and confirmed with Senior Officials and Engineers from Shopify, as well as over a dozen other qualified developers/engineers. At the request of these individuals they will not be publicly named.
A number of individuals and companies have raised concerns about the legitimacy of Nostra’s core product suite, sharing negative experiences that highlighted potentially massive issues.
After investigating the platform, we identified critical technical issues with two of their three flagship products, as well as multiple dubious (and since largely retracted) claims that were promised from these products.
Nostra.ai is a NYC-based SaaS company that raised a $4.2M seed round (according to Crunchbase).
Nostra claims to boost the performance of Shopify storefronts and enable users of their technology to convert visitors into customers more effectively.
They had long boasted this claim as the hero image of their homepage (which has since been taken down):
This in itself is a bit suspicious, as it’s a very bold claim. When we reached out to Arthur Root the CEO of Nostra for comment and to inform him that we were investigating his company, nearly all mentions of site performance score completely vanished from the site. Whereas just moments before, it was the central focus of essentially all of their branding.
He also deleted every single tweet from his personal page that we could find which alluded to site performance as an important factor. His messaging on X became very different right after they edited their entire site, going from performance scores as a central focus… to this.
Arthur Root quoted posting “…the page speed scores are pretty useless…”
Why they swiftly started removing this content will make more sense as you continue to read.
This is going to be a rather long post, so if you’re not THAT invested into reading the whole thing, here’s a TL;DR before we start diving into the Nostra product suite: