EZGenerator

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

~ the obituary ~

Image-Line needed websites. The company had been in Ghent since 1994 and had a hit on its hands in Fruity Loops, later FL Studio, which meant product pages and download pages and a sample library site to keep standing. So they wrote themselves a tool that built the pages for them, templates and all, and ran their own properties on it.

In 2005 they put it on sale. EZGenerator was Windows only, worked entirely by template, and uploaded over FTP to any host you already had, which mattered because the people buying it had a host already and only wanted something to put on it. You paid once. A yearly maintenance fee was optional and bought you new templates rather than the right to keep running the software.

Version 4 arrived on 2 September 2011 as a full rebuild: new interface, new templates, a free Flash banner maker thrown in, and an importer for Artisteer templates so you could bring in designs made elsewhere. A Flash banner maker in late 2011 tells you how much runway the thing had left, though nobody was saying so at the time.

Sales stopped in October 2015. From October 2016 the registration and the template library went free for anyone who already owned a license. Then the development stopped too, and by February 2017 there was no trial download on the site and no one working on it.

~ the case file ~

~ the company behind it ~

Image-Line is one of those small European software houses that spends thirty years on one product and never quite needs anything else. FL Studio has been running on lifetime free updates since the nineties, which is a promise most companies would not survive making, and it still sells.

EZGenerator was the other thing. It never had that kind of oxygen, and a web builder in 2015 was competing with Wix and Squarespace, both of which hosted the result for you and neither of which needed Windows. Image-Line's actual business was a digital audio workstation, and at some point it simply stopped spending on the other thing.

~ how the news arrived ~

It did not. On 20 February 2017 a customer went to the Image-Line forum because they had tried to renew their subscription and learned from the attempt that the product was finished. The post is mostly thanks, addressed to the forum team, for the years of support. The replies under it are other people discovering the same thing at the same moment, one by one, in the same thread.

A final build, 4.4.0.3, turned up in July 2017 for the people who still held licenses. The product page for version 4 is still on the Image-Line site today and now carries one line at the top saying EZGenerator is discontinued and the trial can no longer be downloaded. The domain itself, ezgenerator.com, resolves to FL Studio, which is the honest redirect: the company is still there and still selling, just not this.

I wrote my HTML by hand in those years, so this was never a product aimed at me. What stays with me is the shape of the ending. Nobody owed those customers an announcement, strictly speaking, since they had already been given the software for free. They found out at the one moment that guaranteed it would sting, which was the moment they tried to pay.

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