[Alex3917]

I have no doubt that it wasn't vc profitable, but my assumption (without any inside info) is that the real issue is that they were using some hacked up version of Movable Type that they couldn't upgrade.

It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.

[evanelias]

TypePad was a separate codebase. Still Perl, but designed to be a scalable hosted SaaS / dynamic publishing platform, if I recall correctly. (I was a Six Apart employee 15 years ago, and I didn't work on the TypePad core directly, but I worked on some adjacent projects.)

As for the reasons for the shutdown, I can only speculate, but the maintenance costs for an old huge Perl codebase would likely be a factor. Also the current/final owner of TypePad is the same parent company as BlueHost, and for the past five years they've been refusing new TypePad users, and instead directing folks to BlueHost's paid WordPress hosting. So TypePad's revenue has been dropping for years by design, and consolidation of product offerings seems like the end-goal.

[chipotle_coyote]

Movable Type is, perhaps shockingly, still being actively developed; version 9 is coming out later this year. I’m not sure who the customer base is at this point—some years ago, they dropped the open source version and personal pricing and went to a very enterprise-ish $499/yr model—but I guess somebody is still giving them money.

[throw0101a]

> very enterprise-ish $499/yr model

$500 ÷ 12 = 41.67 per month.

For a personal/fun publishing platform that might be a bit pricey, but that's less than what many people pay for their cell phone plan.

[chipotle_coyote]

That’s fair; it just makes it pretty steep at the low end compared to many other hosted solutions like Ghost, WordPress, or Squarespace. It gives the strong impression that they’re not looking for new customers as much as trying to keep existing commercial ones on board for as long as possible.

[evanelias]

My understanding is that Movable Type remained hugely popular in Japan, even as WordPress overtook it elsewhere.

[tehdely]

Ex-6aer here. TypePad began as a massively multiuser Movable Type but went through a full architectural transition a few years in that made it much more like a typical, scaled-out web app.

That being said, it still had as much tech debt as any other large application, not to mention being 100% Perl, which would have made sustaining engineering pretty difficult the last few years.

The biggest issue is that people have moved on from the sort of self-publishing that it made possible. Chronological blogs have been out of fashion for over a decade. I'm sad to see this happen but not surprised.

[garthwebb]

Small nit, I worked on TypePad directly and it was very influenced by Moveable Type (and maybe some copied code) but it wasn't an instance of Moveable Type. E.g. there was never a time where you could patch TypePad with a MoveableType update. The architecture transition was primarily to stop rebuilding pages after every edit, but that also ended up being a good excuse to try to clean up a bunch of other things too.

[tehdely]

100% correct, and there's no way I could possibly "well ackshyually" you on this, Garth.

I guess the way I look at it is TypePad began with MT's "publish-then-serve" design, but scaled way up. I agree it wasn't actually directly downstream of MT. Regardless, after Seismic and Phenotype/etc. it looked like a three-tier web app, if a bit idiosyncratic.

I do often wish we were living in 6a's (in retrospect) polly-anna view of a future where everyone self-published and built community, instead of whatever... this world is.