Chartio

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

~ the obit ~

Chartio belongs to the class of dead software that nobody ever installed at home. It was something a company bought so that the people in it who could not write SQL could still get at the database, and if you have never worked somewhere with an analytics team you could have spent the whole of the 2010s online without hearing the name. I am an engineer and it still sat two departments away from anything I do.

Dave Fowler started it in 2010 and took it through Y Combinator's summer batch that year, under the name chart.io. TechCrunch wrote it up that August. The idea was narrow and it held: point the thing at a database you already had, then build a chart by dragging a column into a box instead of writing a query. Around that grew dashboards and the rest of the business intelligence furniture, but the drag-a-column trick was always the reason anyone signed up.

It stayed small on purpose. Roughly $8.3 million raised across four rounds in eleven years is a rounding error next to what its competitors took, and the company was still around fifty people in San Francisco at the end. The customer list ran to Ancestry and Change.org, and the numbers Chartio published when the sale was announced were 280,000 users and 10.5 million charts, drawn off more than 100,000 connected data sources.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it did ~

The thing worth remembering about Chartio is who it was for. Business intelligence in 2010 meant a licensed server and a consultant to install it, and then a six-month project before anybody saw a bar chart. Chartio was a login and a database connection string. That is the whole pitch, and it is why a generation of startups ran their entire reporting on it without ever employing a data engineer.

~ the year after the deal ~

Atlassian announced the acquisition on 26 February 2021 and framed it as bringing data visualization into Jira and Confluence. Customers got the email the same day. What nobody said out loud on announcement day was that the standalone product had no future: Atlassian wanted the team and the technology inside its own suite, and had no intention of running a general purpose BI tool that pointed at everybody else's databases.

The closing date came with twelve months of notice, which is more than most acquisitions give. Chartio published a migration guide and kept the exports working the whole way through. On 1 March 2022 the service stopped.

~ the tombstone ~

The domain is the strange part. It still resolves and still serves a real page, and the first heading on it reads "Chartio is going away March 1, 2022" with the migration documentation linked underneath, four years after the fact. Whoever turned the product off left the marketing metadata alone, so the browser tab still says "Cloud-based data analytics exploration for all". The company is gone and the sales copy is still working.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »