bit.io

» see bit.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Adam Fletcher and Jonathan Mortensen founded bit.io in San Francisco in 2019, and it spent its first two years mostly invisible. The private beta opened in 2021. The thing it is remembered for arrived on 26 October 2022, when the company announced serverless Postgres alongside a $7.5 million seed round led by Battery Ventures and GreatPoint Ventures.

The product was a single idea executed stubbornly. You went to the site and you got a Postgres database, without having signed up for anything. No account, and no instance size to pick. You could paste a CSV in and then hand somebody a URL that gave them the same database, queryable in their browser. Every other hosted database in 2022 began by asking who you were and which region you wanted.

Within months of that launch it had more than 15,000 users and about 30,000 databases on the platform.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ one click, no signup ~

I have not used bit.io. I recognize what it was aiming at, because every engineer has the same small recurring problem: you have a table of something and you want to query it properly instead of in a spreadsheet, but the setup costs more attention than the question is worth. My own work sits a long way from hosted Postgres, in computer vision on flying hardware in Ankara, where the data lives on the device and the hard part is getting it off. But the friction bit.io attacked is universal, and so is the reason it is hard to charge for. The moment where a person would happily pay you is about four minutes long.

Databricks, when it explained the purchase later, was unusually blunt about which part it wanted. What it credited the bit.io team with was the trial and the self-service signup path, along with a knack for deleting steps from both.

~ thirty thousand databases ~

The deal was announced on 1 May 2023. The team went to Databricks and the product was given a wind-down schedule measured in weeks. Users had until 29 June to migrate manually with pg_dump and pg_restore. After 29 June the databases shut off and everyone was sent a link to a final dump of their data, which stayed available until 29 July.

Two months, start to finish, for thirty thousand databases that had been created by people who never signed up and therefore never thought of themselves as customers. bit.io the domain no longer resolves at all.

In May 2025 Databricks agreed to buy Neon, another serverless Postgres company, for roughly a billion dollars.

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