Nitrous.io

» see nitrous.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Nitrous.io posted its shutdown notice on 31 October 2016 and turned the service off on 14 November. Fourteen days. Anyone with code sitting in a Nitrous box and no local copy had two weeks to get it out, and the post was blunt about the boxes being deleted rather than archived.

The product was a Linux container with a code editor attached to the front of it, reachable from any browser on any machine you happened to be sitting at. You picked Rails or Node, waited about thirty seconds, and had a working environment with a terminal in it, without installing a single compiler on your own laptop. In 2013 that was a genuinely strange thing to be handed.

It started in Singapore in 2012 under the name Action.io, built by Andrew Solimine, Peter Kim and Arun Thampi, and moved to San Francisco with a $1 million seed round in April 2013. Bessemer led a $6.65 million Series A the following March. Eduardo Saverin was on the cap table alongside 500 Startups and Draper Associates. Total money in: $7.65 million, which is not much for a company whose costs went up every time somebody wrote a line of code.

~ the dossier ~

~ the pitch ~

The argument for a cloud IDE in 2014 was onboarding. A new developer joining a team spent the first day, sometimes the first three, installing the correct versions of everything and finding out which of them fought each other, and Nitrous sold you a snapshot of a machine where that fight was already settled. The demo was one link and a working environment.

The other half of the pitch was collaboration, which every product in this category made and none of them won on. Two people in the same box, editing the same file, watching the same terminal. Useful on stage. In practice teams used git for that and always had.

I never moved my work into one of these. I have been setting up my own machines since the dial-up years and I still do, and the part of the job a cloud IDE removes is the part I am fastest at.

~ two weeks' notice ~

The company had been quiet for most of 2016. A new chief executive came in during 2015 to push the product at professional teams rather than hobbyists, a new pricing model went up in April, and then nothing until the end of October. The notice gave no reason, which is normal for this kind of post, and it offered refunds on anything paid after 16 October, which is not.

They promised an open source version you could run on your own server in the same post that killed the hosted one. That is the standard closing gesture for a developer product whose audience is about to be annoyed, and it tends to arrive late or not at all.

~ what it was early for ~

GitHub shipped Codespaces in 2020 and it is recognizably the same product: a container, an editor in the browser, an environment somebody else configured for you. Gitpod and Replit run on the same idea. What changed is that by 2020 the editor was VS Code, which developers already had open, and the company behind it was Microsoft, which could run the compute at a loss for as long as it wanted to.

Nitrous had four years and $7.65 million against a problem that needed a decade and somebody else's data center.

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