Sandglaz

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

~ the eulogy ~

The one idea was that an unfinished task should move itself. Sandglaz laid your work out as a grid of columns, each column a unit of time, a day if you were working alone and a week if you were working with other people. When a column ran out, anything still unticked rolled into the next one on its own. Completed items stayed where you finished them, so the grid turned into a record of what had actually happened without anyone keeping a log. On the far right sat a column called Later, which held everything you were not pretending to do yet.

Nada Aldahleh and Zaid Zawaideh built it in Toronto starting in 2011. The idea came out of Aldahleh's previous job, where she had managed a team's move from waterfall planning to an agile process and found that the tools assumed something her teams never had, which was a plan that stayed still. The feature went live that November under the name Infinity Grids, and the company went through Techstars in Seattle the following year, raising $500,000 from private investors in December 2012.

The pitch was aimed squarely at the Gantt chart. Their own reference customer, an IT manager at the University of Michigan who had been using it since 2011, told them he had tried Gantt tools and found they assumed fixed plans with fixed assignments, and that his team had given up on software entirely and approximated Sandglaz on a whiteboard. That is close to the perfect testimonial and also a warning, because a whiteboard is free.

Pricing was five dollars per team member per month, flat, with everything included and no tiers to climb. Against Trello, which cost nothing, and Asana, which had raised money by the tens of millions, five dollars a seat was not a weapon. They never raised again after the seed.

~ the dossier ~

~ who it buried ~

Sandglaz spent a few years collecting other people's refugees. When Yahoo killed Astrid in 2013 it published a post titled "Welcome Astrid Users". When Salesforce killed Do.com in 2014 it did the same for them. There is a whole minor genre of blog post in this category, the small company holding the door open while a large one switches off a competitor, and Sandglaz wrote it at least twice.

Four years after the second one it was the thing being switched off, and nobody wrote the post for its users. The task-management category eats its own fast enough to crowd this graveyard without help, and the survivors were mostly the ones who gave the product away and charged for something else.

~ going quiet ~

The ending is visible in the record long before it was announced. The blog kept a regular cadence until September 2015, then managed two posts in 2016 and stopped. The Twitter account posted for the last time on 9 May 2017. At some point in those final months the WordPress install was compromised and started serving search-engine spam above the real posts, with injected links about essay writing sitting on top of the company's own archive, and nobody noticed or nobody had the access left to care.

The notice went up on 3 January 2018 and is four sentences long. Sandglaz would shut at the end of February and cease to operate on 1 March. No further charges would be made and paid features would work until the end. They were grateful for eight years of support. They had given it everything and had still not built a business that paid for itself, and for that they were sorry. The site was captured intact for the last time on 24 February, five days before the date in its own notice.

~ what answers now ~

sandglaz.com returns HTTP 200 today and serves 42 KB that looks like a company still trading. It is not. The domain was parked and advertised for sale in August 2025, and in January 2026 somebody re-uploaded a scraped copy of the 2015 marketing site onto it, complete with the old testimonials and a footer still reading 2015. Every working route underneath is gone, with the sign-in page and the pricing page alike returning 404 from an nginx that has nothing behind it. The Sign In button is an anchor to a pop-up whose form submits to a dead address.

The giveaway is a single link in the markup pointing at an unrelated Spanish-language football site, which is what this kind of re-upload is for. Somebody bought an expired domain carrying a decade of links from other people's pages and dressed it back up in its own clothes to pass that value along. The thing that outlasted the product honestly was the blog, which the founders converted to a static archive in the same two weeks they switched the app off, and which kept serving the goodbye note for seven years afterward.

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