If you’ve done a fair amount of development, you’re sure to have used Nitrou.io at some point of time during your development career. For others, Nitrous.io is a ubiquitous cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that made it easy for developers to work on any programming language without having to download any tool, software kit, or editor. In other words, you can open nitrous.io on your browser, login, and start coding in a programming language of your choice. You even had the choice to share it with other developers and teammates for better collaboration.
Well, all this convenience and ease of use is going to end on November 14! An official release by the company says that it will stop taking on new users, and will refund all payments made to its service after October 16. Anyone with an existing project on Nitrous.io will be sent an email link to download their data, and this link will expire within 15 days.
This announcement came as a surprise for its customers, and the cloud IDE community at large, because Nitrous.io is a popular platform for developers. Founded in 2012, this company has offices in San Francisco and Singapore. It attracted more than 500 investors, including some big names like Golden Gate Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Lion Rock Capital. It even got a funding to the tune of $6.65 million in March 2014. This company is well-known for the huge jump it got within the first year of its operations – 100,000 users even before its first anniversary. With such an impressive background, and a large and satisfied customer base, it’s not clear why the company decided to shut down its operations. Though the team says that it’ll soon release an open-source version of its cloud IDE, it’s not clear when this release would happen. No timelines have been given in this regard.
Looking back, things have been quiet with Nitrous.io since the beginning of this year. The only change was the company’s pricing that was announced in April of this year. Also, this company hired Alex Malinovich, a GitHub alum, as its CEO in July. This strategic change was done with the aim to reach out to more professional developers, along with novices and students. Besides this announcement, there has been no major feature releases for the whole of this year.
Such a long silence followed by this sudden announcement has opened much speculation about what could have gone wrong with the company. Some contend that its strategy to bring in more professional developers did not work out, and the company eventually ran out of money, thereby forcing it to stop operations. A few others believe that it is likely to be acquired by a major player, just like how another cloud IDE, Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon Web Services. None of these speculations have been confirmed by the company yet.
This means, the more than 200,000 developers on this site are going to feel disappointed, as of now. Let’s hope Nitrous.io comes up with its new open-source version soon!
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