Brace.io

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

~ the obituary ~

Brace.io removed the server from static hosting. You put your HTML and CSS into a Dropbox folder, and Brace watched the folder. Edits updated a Draft version automatically, and that draft had its own URL you could send to a client for comments. When it looked right you clicked a button labeled Ship, and the draft went to Production on Amazon's infrastructure. Nothing about it required knowing what a web server was.

The company came out of Y Combinator's Winter 2012 batch and took $120,000 from it. Cole Krumbholz was the cofounder and chief executive. The public launch of the Dropbox hosting came on 12 December 2013, aimed squarely at designers rather than at backend engineers, the people who could build a page but did not want to spend an afternoon on deployment to put it somewhere real.

Squarespace announced the acquisition on 17 November 2014. The coverage framed it as a developer-tools buy, which is a polite way of saying the team was the asset. Brace's homepage put a one-line banner above its own marketing copy, "Brace.io is joining Squarespace," and then went on selling trials underneath it for another two months.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

The Dropbox trick looks small now and was not small in 2013. The competing workflow for a designer with a finished static site was an FTP client plus a mental model of which files on your machine matched which files on the server. Brace made the folder the website. If the file was in Dropbox it was on the internet, in draft, with a link.

Around that it sold small add-ons on their own subdomains. forms.brace.io took submissions from a static page and charts.brace.io drew graphs, with data.brace.io holding the records behind both. Those are exactly the pieces a flat file cannot do by itself, and selling them separately was how a hosting company made one feel dynamic.

~ the sixty-three days ~

From the acquisition notice to the lights going out was nine weeks. Existing users could keep going until 19 January 2015, at which point all Brace sites were disabled and so were the redirects, which is the detail that turns an acquisition into a death. Leaving a redirect up keeps old links alive at almost no cost. Squarespace did not leave one up.

The compensation was better than most. Paying customers were given a full year of Squarespace's unlimited plan, and the company agreed to release the free add-on tools as open source. A goodbye post went up on the Brace blog on 26 January, a week after the service itself had stopped answering.

~ the inheritance ~

I have put sites online with an FTP client and a text editor, which is the exact chore Brace existed to delete, and I never used it. By the time it launched I was writing software in Ankara rather than shipping marketing pages, so it sat one job title away from me the whole time it existed.

The idea outlived the company anyway. Netlify opened the same year Brace closed, GitHub Pages grew into the default for anyone with a repository, and the Dropbox part turned out to be the replaceable half: what people actually wanted was a folder they already had and a button that published it. Brace got there first and got bought for it, which in this business is roughly the same thing as being right.

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