Not just honest, but a morally upstanding one.

Not sure what more you can do when the business isn't going well. 2+ years of maintenance, open sourcing, 2 months notice, data export, no additional billings.

Respect to Dalton and the team.

Open sourcing, data export and a 2 months notice forward are pretty respectful in my book. I wish these where standard procedures for the industry.

On the flip side, it was users demanding free service (under which I include gracious data export) that killed the product in the first place.

I hope we find a way to pay for this stuff more than I hope getting it free becomes standard.

Which is yet another example that the rise of free beer tools made the enterprise developers the only valued ones as customers.

What was “the product”? They got a ton of attention initially but it really felt like that was squandered by the poorly defined message about what you were paying for — especially when many proponents reacted to early “it's like Twitter but open” stories by saying they were wrong and it was something else entirely, possibly only for developers.

The primary memory which I have of that era are people not wanting to pay for something which wasn't clearly useful, shrugging, and going back to Twitter where most other people were. By the time app.net finally launched the free tier the self-inflicted damage was already fatal.

You're absolutely right.

The moment they allowed free accounts was the start of the end. The spam and the noise came. All the things we were trying to avoid. But they just wanted beefier numbers to throw around.

I developed quite a few apps on the platform and made a few thousand in the process. It more than paid the fees back and was totally worth it.

My sentiment exactly. And I agree with Dalton it was worth trying to see if it could fly.

It raises a lot of interesting questions about the sustainability of the "app economy" for me.

I appreciate both of your sentiments, thank you.

I continue to be at least somewhat optimistic that non ad-supported models are worth trying. It seems like Patreon is doing really well and is perhaps something we can all learn from.

I paid into the very beginning. It was never useful to me. I don't regret spending the money to see if it could work.

For me, the lack of apps/integrations made it essentially impossible for me to get the people I wanted to talk to on there on to there.

But I'm really glad you tried, I'm even more glad you've documented what did and didn't work, and I definitely got value for money.

Good luck with whatever's next.

Yeah, for app.net I think it was more chicken and egg that killed you than paid per se. Pay presents an especially difficult chicken and egg problem because not only do you have to get people to part with their time to sign up you have to ask them to pay for what may potentially be no value provided.

I remember trying to explain why it wasn't a stupid idea to people way back when it launched on HN, and had kind of assumed that it'd died years ago.

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Hypothesis: If you can find a way to provide value while you build up the network, the product would do better.

Second hypothesis: If you can find a way to acquire valuable users with a low-effort funnel and 'leech' users with a paid funnel that would also make the product perform better.

Taking these as assumptions for a moment, this would imply a natural advantage for federated networks if they provide interoperability between different services that have value on their own without network effects.

I followed what you were doing at app.net with great interest when it launched. We were also building an app platform, but with a very different focus. https://qbix.com/platform . All our business models are NOT ad supported. Ads are "begging" the user to spend their time and maybe spend money. There are many ways to make money if you make apps for local communities.

We sort of took the tortoise approach to development, and this seems to have helped solve the chicken and egg problem with the userbase.

I will email you about it.

Let me also add - I'm really thankful that you tried so hard to make it work. I really had hopes for it but I guess, the environment was not right.

I'd be very curious to hear the kind of questions this raises about the app economy. Do you mean mobile apps? All software?

App.net was neither. It tried to be a platform for too many things for not enough people. So I can't see how its failure reflects on the economy and not just a bad idea.

Also it's pretty awesome to see a shutdown accompanied with an open sourcing. If every startup did this, we'd have a ton more open source code out there to play with.

> If every startup did this...

But then every startup would have to shut down!

So... Every startup? Except the big companies!

Isn't the failure rate of startups like 99% already?