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