RIP Flynn.io
Cofounder here.We’re surprised and flattered at the interest and discussion.For those wondering why we shut down here’s a brief summary:We created Flynn to be Heroku that you could run on your own infrastructure (cloud or otherwise). We started Flynn as a crowdfunded project with support mainly from other startups, we imagined it would be non-commercial and community-driven.After the prototype it became clear that we would need a full time team to develop and maintain the project. When we couldn’t find anyone who wanted to fund the project long term we applied to YC and then raised a seed round which let us build a 1.0.Unfortunately we were never able to raise more VC so we spent several years trying to build a business that would allow us to keep developing the project.We spent the last four years with a skeleton team and while we were able to build a business doing “ops as a service” for other startups we ultimately couldn’t generate enough revenue to cover both development/features and the 24/7 on call team we needed. While we were able to support our paying customers we couldn’t deliver the features we wanted to build or support unpaid open source users.We also take stability and support really seriously. We were extremely uncomfortable with the fact that people were running Flynn but didn’t know enough to run it safely. So we’d get panicked emails and github issues from users who couldn’t pay us but needed help. That’s a terrible situation for everyone involved.The ecosystem has come a long way since we started (we were one of the first Docker powered projects and started about a year before kubernetes was announced). But we still feel like there’s a need for something like Flynn :(Unfortunately it’s expensive to develop full-featured platforms and we could never get VCs interested in a Series A.The 24/7 on call lifestyle got to be too much for our team, especially during COVID so with no prospects of things changing we decided to call it quits.