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Comment by lhnn | Hacker News Reader

Note to self: don't use a product these devs create. Or, don't ever depend on 'beta' programs for anything.

I get that you have to do your own thing for your life, but what a way to let people down. You had two options for supporting existing users, then you say, "No, we're just shutting it down."

Could have given it away, even.

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I don't think it's really fair to dump on these guys because of this. I definitely agree that nobody should depend on a 'beta' anything in any serious capacity, but Djangy was pretty obviously a small operation trying something out. I was a beta user and absolutely LOVED it, even though I didn't have the best support experiences ever. Anything I hosted with Djangy could easily be moved elsewhere - I highly doubt there were any users with enough data to make migration difficult.

> don't ever depend on 'beta' programs for anything

Surely you already knew this principle.

I agree with this in principle, but in our Web 2.0 world, "beta" has become almost meaningless half the time. Gmail has only come out of beta last year, hasn't it?

Perpetual public beta is a problem, but there's a huge difference between a public beta from a huge corporation and a small private beta from a startup. I think it's pretty easy to judge based on company size, service momentum, number of competitors, etc. if a service is likely to last.

This is the dark side of startups that require no capital expenditure. Easy come, easy go.

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