Fable is winding down

https://www.fable.app/blog/fable-is-winding-down

by timmb • 2 years ago

38 76 2 years ago

Sad, I’ve been waiting for the “figma of after effects”—one of the few positive (albeit unlikely) potentials around the failed adobe purchase.

“However, by the time we started to take Fable to market, AI was beginning to challenge the very nature of software itself, and our multi-modal bet with Prism wasn’t enough to cut through. And while we hold a strong pov on how the next generation of creative workflows should evolve, unfortunately, we don’t have the time to get there.”

Failed AI bet?

a1o• 2 years ago

Has someone reimplemented the flash Editor in some open source project? I know there's a player made in rust.

moralestapia2• 2 years ago

If the founders drop by this thread:

* Please open source it! *

This is the best conclusion for everybody involved.

franze• 2 years ago

Open Sourcing is a lot of work. Plus it might contain (even huge) parts that can not be open sourced. And even unknown parts where real ownership and patents might be unknown.

stonogo• 2 years ago

Where did this bizarre myth start? You apache-license the code you wrote, write a paragraph about code isn't yours or you're not sure about and is therefore missing, and move on with your life.

Patent indemnification is not your problem, it's the problem of whoever wants to use the code.

oidar2• 2 years ago

The app is built, why not just let it simmer for awhile. Are the costs of running it greater than the money it brings in?

sunir• 2 years ago

Yes. The app costs. The insurance costs. The franchise tax costs. The accounting costs. The legal costs.

imiric• 2 years ago

If investors are getting nervous and want a faster ROI, they can decide to bail and force a rapid shutdown.

unshavedyak• 2 years ago

It's a great reason why webapps suck. A licensed local app would be great here, as the customer wouldn't lose value when Fable disappears. Yet now customers lose all value. Great.

So frustrating as a user.

thewebguyd2• 2 years ago

Yep. I lament the loss of native, local apps all the time (and the prevalence of "always online" local apps - I've seen LoB apps that were promising, native apps only to find out they won't run offline because the app does a license check online at startup and will refuse to launch without a connection).

Everything as SaaS web apps is just yet another chapter in the enshittification of tech.

samuelstros4• 2 years ago

Webapps will work locally soon. Say hello to OPFS https://web.dev/articles/origin-private-file-system. Works surprisingly good, see this demo app https://fink2.onrender.com/

tptacek4• 2 years ago

Keeping an app running requires personnel, personnel is expensive, and good personnel is unlikely to cool their heels on an EOL'd app at an EOL'd company.

itake3• 2 years ago

It really doesn’t though. You could scale down to a 1-3 person team. Stop building new features. Keep a full stack dev on for 1year to fix bugs and the remaining team does customer support.

Hiring a contracting company for 3 mo per year to perform updates.

My guess is the decision maker doesn’t think it’s worth their time to run a business like this. Instead of rapidly shifting focus into a higher growth area, they would continue to be attached to a shrinking product

notpushkin2• 2 years ago

On November 15, 2024, the Fable product will be shut down. All users will no longer be able to sign up, log in, or access files. All customer data and project files will be permanently deleted [...]
We recommend you look through your Fable files and export your projects off the platform (e.g. to mp4, gif, lottie… etc).

I genuinely am at a loss for words here. Somebody sat down and decided that giving you your project sources in some form is too much work, just a GIF export will do.

(For those looking to save their data: go for Lottie, it’s a bit more versatile and you can preserve vector data at least.)

EDIT: the ideal way to go here would of course be open sourcing the whole thing!

tsimionescu• 2 years ago

Was Fable using a well-known format, or is it a proprietary format specific to the app ? If it's proprietary, would it make any sense to export it directly? Is it even a file format, or is it possible they were simply storing various pieces of data related to your project in various places in backend DBs?

sentientslug• 2 years ago

Says in the article “the Fable file format is not transferable to other platforms.”

invaderzirp2• 2 years ago

This shouldn't be surprising anymore. This has happened every week since 2010. This is the VC cycle, and it happens over and over and over and over and over again. In fact, I'm sure there's some flashy new thing on the front page right now that will have its own corresponding "goodbye" thread in 2-10 years, and everyone will get screwed by that, too.

We can lament the current state of affairs, but let's not pretend it's abnormal.

jwr2• 2 years ago

I run a solo bootstrapped SaaS. When people sometimes ask me whether I think this is a stable business, I tell them that with a VC-funded company, it's almost certain that there will be an outcome in several years that will not be good for customers. VC-funded companies go bankrupt, get acqui-hired, or get strategically acquired most of the time, and all these outcomes are bad for customers. The only outcome which is slightly less negative is going public, but very few companies reach that stage, and even then you get endless feature creep and progressive ensh*ttification (like with Dropbox, for example).

Self-funded sustainable businesses can be much more stable in the long term.

notpushkin2• 2 years ago

Yeah, this is the “disappointed but not surprised” kind of situation.

next_xibalba• 2 years ago

I think it says more about us that we are at a loss for words or shocked that a startup goes under and its unwinding is messy. It is neither a big deal, nor is it particularly unethical that this should happen. Caveat emptor. This type of reaction should be reserved for real catastrophes like a cancer diagnosis, a war, the death of a loved one, etc.

Have we all become so fragile that something as minor as a startup with a small number of users shutting down causes us shock and disgust?

Ensorceled• 2 years ago

This is a website full of startup people, a startup going under with a messy shutdown is something I would expect this audience to be upset about.

This type of reaction should be reserved for real catastrophes like a cancer diagnosis, a war, the death of a loved one, etc.

Why are you on here lecturing us? Shouldn't you be out saving the world or something important? Or at least lecturing politicians?

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

It always amazes me how many of these "we're winding down X" stories hit the front page here and I've never heard of X. We really do work in silos, even if it doesn't seem that way.

parsimo20102• 2 years ago

Or maybe it's that you're well informed and X wasn't well known...

When a product shuts down it's usually because it wasn't profitable (or not profitable enough). Either they didn't get enough paying customers or they set their pricing too low. For whatever reason- but there's probably some correlation between a product shutting down and many people not being aware of its existence.

Even without being well known, these stories can hit the front page if a few people upvote a post quickly, and then the post gets a few sympathy votes as it rises up the page.

turnsout• 2 years ago

When a VC-backed company shuts down, it's usually because they weren't growing. You can only get to the next round of funding if you're still growing—otherwise you run out of runway.

I don't think profit plays a big role.

invaderzirp2• 2 years ago

This is what happens when massive amounts of free money slosh around courtesy of ZIRP. Question is: will everybody rush to join whatever new darling graces the front page? Or will they finally learn their lesson?

pc866• 2 years ago

This seems like a weird comment to make a throwaway for :)

unsnap_biceps• 2 years ago

I had actually assumed it was the studio behind the Fable games, or some sort of mmrpg based on the games.

ErikAugust• 2 years ago

I have no idea why my startup Halo failed.

drekipus• 2 years ago

Same, my initial reaction is shock and disgust that I was missing out on a fable mmorpg

neaanopri• 2 years ago

Maybe if you had heard of it, it wouldn't be winding down

tombert• 2 years ago

Yeah, I thought it was the F#-to-JS compiler, and I was sad for a moment. I've never heard of this app so it's hard for me to be too upset over it.

iLoveOncall2• 2 years ago

The very best example of that is the Kagi search engine which, if you spend on time of HN, looks very widely used, but actually has less than 10,000 customers.

freediver• 2 years ago

It is the right order of magnitude, but when stats are already publiclcy available let's be accurate :)

https://kagi.com/stats

henning• 2 years ago

However, by the time we started to take Fable to market, AI was beginning to challenge the very nature of software itself

No it didn't. ChatGPT spitting out snippets of broken shit where you have to tell it exactly what you want and think through the entire architecture yourself is not a challenge to the nature of software. Especially older models that were even worse than the current 2024 ones.

Also, AI-generated code is still code. The underlying hardware still works the same.

blacksqr• 2 years ago

Do they live happily ever after?

ratedgene• 2 years ago

Huh, it's interesting the supposition is that AI tools are the future, therefore they're unable to compete in time especially when they seemed perfectly poised to adopt that strategy.

Why wouldn't they use that to sell another round to bridge?

masto• 2 years ago

I was just looking at motion graphics (I guess it's called motion design now) tools yesterday. I have a small YouTube channel and I was noodling around with the idea of making a little intro screen that just does some kind of swishy flooshy thing. I am very good at operating technical software, but I have no graphic design skills, so as much as I am concerned about and skeptical about AI "art", I thought I'd see what's out there. Maybe instead of starting from a template, it could generate an idea that I could finish my own way.

To get to the point: I didn't find anything that looked usable. Maybe it's telling that I didn't find Fable/Prism at all. But from what I can make of their site, it seems to be about adding (to my eye, unpleasant and unnecessary) textures, rather than generating new animations.

This looked like a nice piece of software with a lot of functionality and a meaningful customer base. It sucks that everything is grow, grow, grow, grow, exit, or die. I've been contemplating starting something, but I don't know if there's any oxygen left for the idea of simply making something people want and selling/operating it at a reasonable profit.

bruce511• 2 years ago

I found the "why are we closing down" to be somewhat weak.

I mean, you're closing down cause you ran out of cash right? But apparently the app is beloved by customers... right?

Something about AI (which seems somewhat vague...)

Anyway, why not just be honest? We swung for the fences, didn't quite get there, the money is all gone, and no-one wants yo give us more...

Frankly as post mortems go, this one is pretty weak.

karmakaze• 2 years ago

I was wondering the same, was it a decision or a realization? I suppose the decision part is to do it now rather than later when it can get messier. I've gone down with a startup ship and it was rather pointless.

adamc• 2 years ago

Yet another example of how startups are often a negative for customers.

schnebbau• 2 years ago

From their terms:

You must be 18 years of age or older and reside in the United States or any of its territories to use the Services

In hindsight, excluding 95.3% of the world from using their product may have been a mistake.

pc866• 2 years ago

What's the TAM of people who want a web-app vector graphics and animation tool? It's certainly less than 8 billion.

groby_b2• 2 years ago

How on earth does the "AI! Paradigm change!" noise make any sense as reason for a shutdown?

hiyer• 2 years ago

I thought it was the reading community app [1], which I use off and on. Never heard of these guys, so nothing to see here for me.

1. https://fable.co/

your_challenger• 2 years ago

What does AI have to do for the shutting down of a motion graphics design app?

They focused on the wrong thing, spent too much money and decided to call it quits.

Fable is winding down

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