FloydHub

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 2017 the hard part of training a neural network was not the network. It was getting a machine with a working GPU, a driver that agreed with the CUDA version, a CUDA version that agreed with the framework build, and then keeping that arrangement intact long enough to run an experiment. FloydHub sold the absence of that work. You installed a command line tool, typed floyd run in your project directory, and your code went to a cloud GPU with the stack already assembled, billed by the hour at something like forty cents on a K80, with a flat ninety-nine dollars a month on top for a seat.

The company came out of a side effect. Before there was a product, Sai Soundararaj published two repositories, one a guide to setting up a deep learning machine and one a Docker image with everything preinstalled, and they picked up thousands of stars between them from people with exactly that problem. The GitHub organization appeared on 29 August 2016, the command line tool reached the Python package index on 20 January 2017, and the company launched publicly on Hacker News on 16 February 2017, out of the winter 2017 Y Combinator batch. Two founders, four people on the team.

~ the dossier ~

~ the release cadence as a chart of the company ~

You can read the whole arc in the version history of one Python package. The command line client shipped fifty-five releases in 2017, twenty-two in 2018, two in 2019, and then nothing after 11 January 2019. The blog stopped publishing in June 2020. By the time the shutdown notice went up there had been fourteen months of silence on the one channel the company used to talk to its users, and the notice itself was the only thing published after it.

~ the thirty days ~

The email went out on 21 July 2021 and said the quiet part plainly: the last date of operation would be Friday, 20 August 2021, after which all services and data would become permanently inaccessible. Someone posted it to Hacker News seven minutes after the shutdown page went live. A month is a short notice period for a service holding your training data and a generous one for a company with no money, and the founders used it to transition every remaining user out by hand.

Two days after the deadline, Naren Thiagarajan published the retrospective, which is where the time of death comes from: FloydHub was shut down at 5:00pm Pacific on Friday, 20 August 2021, with all users previously notified and moved off by that date. The reason they gave was the plainest one available: the AI market was still in its nascency, and in spite of enthusiastic usage by many of you, they wrote, they could not build a sustainable business.

~ where the money went ~

The arithmetic was always going to be cruel. FloydHub bought GPU capacity and resold it with a seat fee attached, so its margin lived in the gap between what a cloud provider charges for interruptible hardware and what an individual researcher will tolerate paying. Spot pricing kept that gap thin, and the flat ninety-nine dollars a month is a comfortable number for a company and an unserious one for a graduate student. The hundred thousand users were real. The hundred thousand paying users never existed.

By 2017 I was doing computer vision work where this question was permanent: rent the hardware or buy the card. In Ankara the card was a capital decision with an import price attached, and renting by the hour from a small company abroad was the sort of thing you considered and then did not do, because the free hosted notebooks turned up in that same window and asked nothing of anyone. FloydHub was killed by the same reasoning it had made easy.

~ the blog they promised to leave up ~

The farewell said they planned to keep the blog alive, and for a while they did: the tutorials stayed readable for almost three years. Today floydhub.com is gone and blog.floydhub.com answers with a 526 from Cloudflare, because the certificate on the origin behind it expired. The copy of the blog they moved to a hosted platform returns a 402, the status code for an unpaid invoice.

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