Kadira is Shutting Down

It's sad to see Arunoda shut down Kadira. Kadira was an inspiration to me when I was learning Meteor two years ago. However, the JS ecosystem was highly in flux and React was starting to emerge. Meteor was plagued (mainly by subscribing to Mongos OP log) by performance issues once you reached a relatively small amount of concurrent users. It feels like people are moving on from Meteor, if they haven't already, to more performant stacks. With that said, I wish Arunoda the best of luck in his next venture.

Kadiras pricing was completely incompatible with the Meteor app I work on as per host pricing is hard to swallow when you only have a dozen or two users on each host (eg: Kidara would have cost us ~$1/end user/month). Per host pricing is nice when you have hundreds/thousands of users per host.

Our software gets installed at each customer site/ship at sea due to high frequency of internet outages or wide variations in bandwidth (ships at sea have very limited connections). While each customer might have hundreds of users, it ends up to be a dozen or two users per host. This is also why Meteor is a good fit as performance doesn't really matter when the software only sees a dozen users per host.

While they only billed per nominal host (its approx: host hours/hours in month) so corner cases are easy, we still have a ridiculous users per host ratio due to the nature of our app. I'm a big fan of services that have an option to charge per GB of telemetry as it can cover use cases like ours without much fuss.

Its still sad to see them go though, and its nice to see them softly shutdown rather than the typical "we are pulling the plug tomorrow".

I'm surprised that Meteor itself wouldn't have jumped in to at least acquihire the team, so that face is saved all around. Losing one of the most prominent fixtures in the Meteor ecosystem doesn't seem to bode well for Meteor's long term prospects. And I say that as someone that has been a fan of the project, and in the past was a heavy user.

While I'm not happy, as a Kadira user, to see them go, it's really refreshing to see a startup fold in such a graceful way, much more graceful than even big companies ever do with their projects (I'm looking at you, Google). They not only did provide a clear timeline of events thats not immediate (2 months is plenty of time to prepare), they are also going to release a self-hosted solution and a way to migrate all data for existing clients.

So far the comments are about the folding company (probably to be expected given the title), however for those of us not plugged into the meteor ecosystem - does this reflect at all on the general meteor ecosystem? Plugging into Mongo (among other "issues" I felt I saw) I mostly stayed away, but haven't kept good tags on.

Meteor 'sailors' are jumping ship.