[drewda]

> As we focus on Claude Platform capabilities and connecting agents to APIs, we’ll be winding down all hosted Stainless products, including our SDK generator. Starting today, new signups, projects, and SDKs will not be available.

For better or worse, it's an acquihire.

[atomicthumbs]

"Hundreds of companies rely on Stainless to generate SDKs, CLIs, and MCP servers—the libraries, command-line tools, and connectors that let developers and agents use an API."

not anymore lol

[windexh8er]

I'm waiting for the Enterprise space to wise up. For anyone who's ever worked with any reasonably large company as a vendor (especially a small one) you know how painful redlines in legal can be. Why TF haven't enterprise made it more painful for these events? Basically state that if the service is purchased/sold/shuttered prior to the contract expiry date that a significant penalty (e.g. full refund) is required and including some portion of investment made to onboard said service/product/tool.

I can't even imagine the money wasted on turn-and-burns in the F1000 alone. The US needs a wake up call with respect to consumer / buyer protections. The life of the snake oil salesman is plentiful these days, and you have a lot of AI-psychotic executives who can't seem to get enough.

[ElFitz]

> Why TF haven't enterprise made it more painful for these events?

They mostly have. By mostly refraining from dealing with startups and companies they deem either “too young” or "too small" to be reliable partners. And, when they do, imposing long sales cycles.

And thus the enterprise well is poisoned for most startups.

[borski]

Usually because they need the technology the vendor is selling.

But buyers try to insert this language into partner/ biz dev contracts all the time.

Much less common for sales.

[bartread]

100%.

A place I worked some years ago we even had an escrow foisted on us by our larger partner in the agreement so that they’d be able to continue running the software we were building if we went under.

Honestly, it was a pain in the ass and meant that for them alone we ended up running an older version of the software than we offered to clients because as we developed its capabilities it became ever more integrated into our core platform and we weren’t about to escrow that.

When the agreement came up for renewal at the three year mark we managed to get the escrow clauses removed.

[yowayb]

A lot of money is made this way. It'll take an act of Congress (or something on that level) but many of us are already "on the take" so to speak, so I doubt it'll ever happen.

[tedd4u]

This is why it's good to consider an open-source product backed by an enterprise support company. Growthbook is an example. If they go poof you still have dozens to hundreds of other companies, and open source base, and can collaborate with the other users (companies) to crate a foundation to carry on development if needed. Or just patch it yourself. There's a continuum depending on how critical and how deeply you exploit it.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Why TF haven't enterprise made it more painful for these events?

Hadn't heard of Stainless before today. Did it have enterprise customers?

[dgellow]

You can get an overview at https://www.stainless.com/customers/

Though that list isn’t complete

[phoenixy1]

Yes, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cloudflare, among others.

[smrtinsert]

what is the value in destroying those relationships? I assume it was acquisition to defend against another company owning a key part of their delivery pipeline, but killing the public product is just bad press.

[somewhatgoated]

the relationships and enterprise customers they have are probably wildly blown out of proportion and few if any actually used the product in production.

They can also keep the product running behind the scenes for a select few and just shut down the public facing part

[mcintyre1994]

It would be weird if Anthropic were genuinely using it as they say they have been for years but everyone else was a fake customer.

[prpl]

"rely" is overly strong in these cases usually (more like "make use of")

[xboxnolifes]

Hundreds of companies used to live here, now its a ghost town.

[paulddraper]

That is WILD to put those statements together in the same article.

[embedding-shape]

What's WILD is people ending up relying on these essentially startup-slops that just serves to give you future technical debt once you have to eventually moved away because they got acquired by $INSERT_BAD_GUY_OF_THE_MONTH

[shimman]

The only people "relying" on this are other startups whose VC benefactors force them to use other products under their portfolio in order to goose up their numbers.

[dgellow]

You’re wrong though. Please take a look at https://www.stainless.com/customers/.

For context I was the founding member of our customer eng team, the main drive for Stainless adoption came from engineering teams who didn’t have the time/capacity/expertise to implement high quality SDKs + maintain the whole release pipeline automation across multiple languages. The pitch is „we want you to focus on your domain of expertises. We handle all the plumbing for your end users to have the best DX possible when using your services“. Which is IMHO very compelling

[embedding-shape]

> Which is IMHO very compelling

It is indeed, and I totally understand why people want something like that! Shame about the closing of the service though, which will pretty much make everyone turn away from similar solutions in the future if they're provided by a startup, as the rugpull Stainless is about to do will be a bitch to deal with for many.

The goal for the customers was to save time, little did they know Anthropic had other ideas for them :)

[CityOfThrowaway]

I've raised venture from a lot of the big firms (and a lot of small firms) and have never had any of them attempt to force me to use anything.

[windexh8er]

You may not even see it. I worked in a startup whose founder had money dipped into about a dozen products in the cyber security vertical. Many of those startups, I later found out, had access or used products from others in his portfolio. Basically taking $50k and cycling it through all of them buying something from the other one. I doubt it was a money laundering scheme, but it sure was convenient to just add logos of "customers" to the Nascar pitch slide.

[rafram]

Go to the website of pretty much any AI startupslop, Google who led their series A, then Google who led the series A of the other AI startups (it’s always other AI startups) whose logos they show as users/testimonials/case studies on their landing page. You’ll start seeing a pattern.

[gneray]

+1

[b65e8bee43c2ed0]

that makes so much sense. I always wondered how the fuck did all those ZIRP era "hello world as a service" bullshit startups have any customers at all.

[nerdsniper]

Well, my org decided to pay for Monday.com, and still does, even though no one uses it. We also pay for Asana, and the wonks use that instead.

I suspect a lot of larger orgs just have site-wide subscriptions with volume discounts that they don’t need.

[dgellow]

Stainless wasn’t created during the zero-interest era. And we had paying customers since literally the first month of existence. We developed everything in close collaboration with customers

[georgemcbay]

> I always wondered how the fuck did all those ZIRP era "hello world as a service" bullshit startups have any customers at all.

In addition to the previously mentioned collusion, a lot of the time reported users/customers are literally just fake.

See for example Sam Altman's Loopt scam.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/C8feBk4luaE

[yawnxyz]

Stainless was a fantastic product; every product/service has to start from somewhere

[jMyles]

It may be that there are many projects relying on Stainless, or, as a sibling comment points out, it may be portfolio-based stack selection rather than actual feature dependence.

Either way, it does seem irresponsible and tone deaf for an acquiring/hiring company and an acquired/hired company to send these conflicting signals. If one puts oneself out there as dependable in the face hopes and needs of other, smaller, up-and-coming projects, then a rapid wind-down for $ is incongruent with such a posture.

So much so that, at least for my part, I'd be quite reluctant to hire someone who had engaged in this sort of bob-and-weave pursuit.

[mcintyre1994]

They didn’t. The first is from the Stainless blog post, the second is from Anthropic’s.

[btown]

FYI the above quote is (sadly) real and is from Stainless's blog post: https://www.stainless.com/blog/stainless-is-joining-anthropi...

[layer8]

A Stainless steal? ;)

[gen220]

Wow, OpenAI is a stainless customer right?