Sunset Clock

The original BaaS death. Facebook bought it in 2013 for $85M, killed it in 2016. Parse Server exists as OSS zombie.

Atlassian killed HipChat, built Stride as replacement, then killed Stride too and invested in Slack. Double death.

Built as HipChat replacement. Killed before it had a chance. Atlassian admitted defeat in chat.

From React's recommended framework to abandoned in 3 years. The GraphQL data layer was overly complex. Astro's simpler model won.

Was THE CI/CD for open source. The Idera acquisition destroyed developer trust. Every .travis.yml is being replaced with GitHub Actions.

Classic FOMO-driven app. Exclusivity created buzz but couldn't retain users once everyone got in. Peak was 10M weekly active users in Feb 2021.

Heroku invented the modern PaaS. Now it's a cautionary tale of what happens when a big corp acquires a developer product.

Rare case where the maintainer explicitly told users to leave. The educational guides remain, but the package is sunsetting.

React's official deprecation was the formal end. Bundle sizes, slow dev server, Webpack 5 lock — CRA was untenable for years before the announcement.

Bower predated npm's modular packaging story. Once Webpack/Browserify/npm could handle frontend deps, Bower had no reason to exist.

Once the dominant consumer VoIP product. Microsoft acquired for $8.5B in 2011 and let it wither.

GitHub sunset their own editor in favor of VS Code post-Microsoft acquisition. Electron itself was born from Atom.

Backbone defined the early MVC-in-the-browser era. It walked so React/Angular could run.

Adobe announced EOL in 2017 with three years notice. Ruffle continues for game preservation.

Adobe paid $1B breakup fee to Figma in 2023 and quietly buried XD.

Gatsby was the darling of 2019. GraphQL data layer proved too complex. Astro solved the same problem simpler.

Classic acqui-kill. Netlify removed a competitor. Gatsby Cloud shut down, team disbanded. The GraphQL data layer that once seemed innovative became the thing that killed DX.

The canonical example of big-tech acquisition killing a beloved developer tool. Salesforce extracted value without investing. Each year the gap with alternatives grows.

Adobe's failed Figma acquisition led them to just abandon XD entirely. Rare case where a company gave up a product category to a single competitor.

FaunaDB's proprietary FQL query language meant maximum lock-in and zero portability. When the company died, users had to completely rewrite data access layers.

Cordova was the first real mobile web wrapper. Capacitor is the spiritual successor with better architecture. PhoneGap (Adobe's fork) died first.