Kite is saying farewell and open-sourcing its code
&gt; Our diagnosis is that individual developers do not pay for tools.<p>I know this first hand, building a developer tool startup and failing to reach any level of revenue. In the end, the tech was bought out by a larger company to recover a fraction of our VC investment.<p>The challenge is that when you&#x27;re building software for developers, they already know how it must work.<p>It&#x27;s like trying to sell magic tricks to magicians. Sell magic to regular people, and you&#x27;ll see some significant revenue.<p>I&#x27;ve used Kite before. It was ok. But I am a SWE. It&#x27;s entirely possible that Kite would have seen major adoption if the push was towards non-technical folks trying to get their feet wet in software. Eg: Data scientists or business.<p>The reason why BI tools sell so well at the moment is that you have tons of C-level execs that like the appeal of a business-optimizing tool requiring little to none of any actual software development.<p>Let that be a lesson to everyone. You can&#x27;t blow away developers. They&#x27;re just too damn ~~smart~~ well-informed.<p>Edit: Another anecdote: A buddy of mine built a bespoke OCR and document indexing&#x2F;search tool. He has ~60 paying clients (almost exclusively law-firms and banks) that primarily work with printed pages on paper. No Saas. No free tier. The client data resides on an on-premise Windows box, avoiding issues with sensitive data in the cloud etc.<p>He&#x27;s a solo dev with support contracts and nets something like $1000&#x2F;month from each client.<p>For your average lawyer&#x2F;paralegal, the ability to locate and reference a single page from thousands of pages in under a second is magic. So they pay for it wholeheartedly.