Amazon Chime

» see aws.amazon.com/chime as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 13 February 2017 Amazon put a video meeting product on sale. There was a free tier that handled two people. Above it sat a $2.50 tier for chat and a $15 per user per month tier for the conferencing anybody actually wanted, which placed it precisely where Zoom and WebEx were already standing. The argument for buying it was never that it was better. It was that it came from AWS, so a company already renting compute from Amazon could take its meetings off the same invoice.

It did not start inside Amazon. Biba Systems was a San Francisco startup building WebRTC conferencing under Carlin Wiegner, and Amazon took it over through a shell entity called Justin Acquisition, recorded in Delaware filings in September 2015. Nothing was announced. GeekWire pieced the paperwork together a year later and reported that neither side would discuss it, and the product that emerged fifteen months after that never put the name Biba anywhere near its marketing.

Nobody picks the video call software at their own job. It arrives in a message from IT with a link and a login, and you use what the company bought, which is the whole reason a product in this category lives or dies at a purchasing decision rather than with users. I have sat in a lot of meetings on software I had no part in choosing. Chime lost that decision everywhere it was offered, and eventually it lost it at Amazon too.

AWS published the notice on 19 February 2025. New customers stopped the same day. Existing accounts were given a year, and support ended on 20 February 2026. The stated reason was that use outside Amazon was limited and that partners offered good collaboration products, which is a courteous way of writing down a defeat.

~ the record ~

~ the part that sold ~

The valuable half of Chime was never the app. AWS carved the conferencing engine out as the Amazon Chime SDK and sold it to developers who wanted audio and video inside their own software, and in June 2020 Slack licensed it to power Slack Calls. The machinery behind Amazon's unwanted meetings product went on to carry voice and screen sharing for a workplace chat tool competing directly with Amazon.

That SDK is explicitly still alive. The AWS blog post and the end-of-support documentation carry the identical sentence: this does not impact the availability of the Amazon Chime SDK service. What stopped was the part with a name and a login page.

~ what amazon used instead ~

The sharpest evidence against Chime was always internal. Amazon handed its staff Slack in 2020, and when the shutdown landed in 2025 the internal replacement for meetings was Zoom, with Microsoft 365 taking the rest. A company with well over a million employees looked at a conferencing tool it owned outright, at no license cost to itself, and paid a competitor instead.

That is a harder verdict than any adoption figure, and adoption figures for Chime are genuinely absent from the public record. No user count, no customer count, no market share was ever published. For a product that ran nine years inside the largest cloud vendor on earth, the number that survives it is zero.

~ the notice and the year after ~

The page at aws.amazon.com/chime still answers. The banner at the top reads in the past tense now, saying that on February 20, 2026, AWS ended support for the Amazon Chime service and that Chime can be used in special cases to join meetings. Below it the feature list is untouched, still advertising chat and screen sharing for a product nobody can buy. The short address chime.aws redirects to a getting started page for a thing that has already finished.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »