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.
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
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 :)
I see it differently. I don’t think it is fair to describe it as a rug pull, the sdks we generated are owned by customers and aren’t going away. They own the repositories. We also implemented a self-service option just for the transition out from Stainless SaaS.
The most important part in my opinion is that with Stainless we were able to prove that a profitable market for SDK codegen exists and that people do care a lot about the quality of the generated code. New and existing players can take advantage of the segment we contributed developing. We also proved that a whole set of companies are ready to pay to provide an excellent developer experience to their end users.
At the same time the whole ecosystem is being reinvented by AI, it is possible that Stainless as it was doesn’t make sense in a future where everything is agentic, it’s hard to say.
I personally believe there is still a lot of values that can be found in the space Stainless built — and I’m sure Fern and others will continue to grow and develop solutions around OpenAPI
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.
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.
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.
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
