Jexia

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

~ the obituary ~

Jexia was founded in 2015 in the Netherlands and sold the thing every small development team wants and nobody wants to maintain: a backend you do not have to write. Datasets with an API in front of them, user accounts and authentication, file storage, somewhere to host the application itself. You wired your frontend to it and skipped the part where you argue about Postgres.

The team was small and oddly distributed for a company that size. Its own about page counted nine nationalities spread across five locations, with the Netherlands as headquarters and the rest of the staff in Spain, Russia, Ukraine and Armenia. In 2019 it raised four million euros from private investors, which for a European backend platform competing against Google's Firebase was a serious but not a comfortable amount of money.

In early March 2020, days before the coronavirus crisis reordered everything, the Dutch daily AD reported that Jexia had dismissed more than a third of its employees. What followed was worse than a layoff round. The company then asked the developers who remained to sign away their rights to salary. No figure for the remaining runway was ever published, and after a request like that none was needed.

It took another year to finish. On 15 March 2021 a set of new entries appeared in the company's FAQ, and the first of them answered the only question anybody had.

~ the case file ~

~ the last FAQ ~

The wording is worth preserving, apostrophe and all, because it is about as plain as a shutdown notice gets. "Yes, we will be taking down the platform and all it's contents by April 30th 2021. All user agreements also end on that date." A second entry confirmed the rest: every dataset, every account, the payment details, the projects and all backups, permanently deleted once the contractual retention term expired.

Underneath sat a question headed "How can I export my datasets?", and the answer was a shrug dressed as documentation. Use an HTTP client that can write to a file, curl or wget, and pull your records out in batches of five hundred at a time. There was no export button and no bulk dump. Customers wrote their own loop or lost the data.

~ what the category looked like by then ~

Backend-as-a-service was a crowded idea that had already buried bigger names. Parse sold to Facebook and got switched off anyway. StackMob went to PayPal and vanished. By 2021 the surviving independents were competing with a Google product that was effectively free at the bottom of the curve, and a four million euro round does not buy you a price war with Firebase.

As an engineer I recognize the trade Jexia was selling and I understand why its customers took it. The cost of that trade only becomes visible on a day like 15 March 2021. Six weeks is not long to stand up a database and an auth layer that somebody else had been running for you since 2015.

~ after the lights went out ~

The platform died on schedule and the website did not. Through April and into early May 2021 jexia.com was still answering, still redirecting visitors into the marketing site exactly as it had the year before, with nothing on the front page to suggest the product behind it was already gone. The archive crawlers kept collecting a normal corporate homepage for a company that had finished deleting its customers' data.

By mid-September 2021 the domain had started returning 404, and it stayed that way. Today jexia.com does not resolve at all. The docs subdomain survived longest, as docs subdomains tend to, serving a getting-started guide for a platform that could no longer be gotten started on.

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