Bundlr

» see bundlr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Bundlr's one good idea was about storage, not about tagging. Most tools in the curation boom of 2011 saved you a URL and a title. Bundlr saved the thing itself, in its own format, so a photograph stayed a photograph and an embedded tweet stayed an embedded tweet. These went into a page called a bundle that other people could add to while you were still building it. Sérgio Santos and Filipe Batista started it in Coimbra in 2010 and Pedro Gaspar came in as a partner in the middle of 2011.

The funding was fifteen thousand euros of seed capital from a Portuguese fund, with Mário Valente advising. By the time Techli wrote the company up there were 8,500 users and a freemium ladder: teams paid five dollars a month to curate together, and private bundles cost ten. The last pricing page, in January 2017, had settled on $19.99 a year for everything, and what the money bought was privacy on your bundles plus an offline copy of every clip mirrored into your Dropbox.

For fifteen thousand euros it shipped a long way. There were apps for both phone platforms and a web product that worked without one. Bundles were public unless you paid, and that default is the reason the archive still holds thousands of them.

Curation tools were an Anglophone startup genre and I was never in the audience for one. Bundlr still has the better technical argument of the bunch. Keeping the media rather than the pointer aged well, because the pointer is the part that rots: a bookmark to a 2012 photo is usually a 404 by now, while a 2012 bundle, wherever the service survived, still shows you the photo.

~ fifteen thousand euros ~

Portugal's startup scene in those years was small enough that TechCrunch could cover the whole of Lisbon in one article, and Coimbra is not even Lisbon. Fifteen thousand euros buys runway measured in months rather than years, and it means the product has to find revenue early or find a buyer. Bundlr did neither, and what it did instead was keep running, quietly, for about five more years than that budget suggests.

That tells you something about where the money went, and the answer is mostly nowhere. A small application on a platform-as-a-service, with no sales team and a public bundle feed doing the marketing. The bill for keeping Bundlr alive stayed small enough that nobody ever had to hold a meeting about it. Between 2012 and 2016 the company published no new funding, no acquisition and no version announcement that the record preserves.

~ what filled the bundles ~

The archive's crawl of bundlr.com in October 2016 is the most honest document in this grave, because of what the public bundles had become. One of them advertises Dell technical support phone numbers; another is titled eighteen places to buy targeted traffic. Scroll the crawl and you get a two-bedroom apartment listing in Vashi sitting next to a used BMW at a dealership in Greensboro. The platform's open front door had been found by the people who find open front doors, and the discovery feed that was supposed to sell the product was handing out backlinks instead. Those bundles are what the Internet Archive preserved, so the surviving record of Bundlr is mostly somebody else's search-engine work.

~ application error ~

The ending is legible almost to the day, because every failed crawl is a dated record of a server that answered wrongly. On 19 December 2016 the site started returning 503s. It recovered, and on 4 January 2017 at 14:37 UTC it served a completely normal marketing page, premium tier and all, with no notice of anything wrong. By the morning of 6 January it was a 503 again. A 500 on 13 January is the last distinct error it produced, and from then until 2022 every single crawl got the same application error.

In January 2023 the response changed one final time, to a 404 from Heroku's own CDN reading No such app, which is what the address still says today. The 503 meant a dead dyno that somebody could in principle have restarted. The 404 means the app record itself was deleted, six years after the last visitor saw a working page, by a cleanup nobody announced and nobody attended.

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