Cligs Shutting Down

It is with great sadness that I have to shut down Cligs. On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics.

The forwarding data will be retained so that forwarding can continue for at least till the end of November; after that, there are no guarantees as to how long the service will continue to forward the short URLs to their destinations.

Shortly (in a few days), I’ll be deploying a mechanism to export your data. It is almost done and just needs a bit more testing before I’m comfortable releasing it.

Why Now?

There isn’t a short answer to this as there are lots of interacting factors. Here is what I can tell you:

• Short URLs are a feature, and are definitely not a business on their own. This assertion is fact in my mind given what I’m seeing in the market and what my customers and users are saying. There comes a point when you need to actually hear the message the market is telling you, and not just listen and ignore it. This is the core reason.
• Cligs is a big service (for some definition of big). It has tens of thousands of registered user accounts, and does tens of millions of forwards a month. Not bad for a one man show doing this on the side. However, a service this size requires customer support, which is time. It’s not much time in absolute terms (an hour a day usually), but again, for me, it’s a context switch I can do without.
• I have a nice plan for how to add premium features on top of offering short URLs. When I look at that plan as a business, it’s quite separate from a short URL play. Building on what I have now, and integrating the two might work but will require a lot of effort (i.e. time) that I cannot afford to give. This is the other major reason.
• Finally, it all costs some money. It’s a bit of money out of pocket every month. By necessity, the Cligs architecture is extremely efficient for what it does.

Any questions or feedback in the comments below, or contact me privately.

This entry was posted on Sonntag, Oktober 4th, 2009 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Cligs News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.