> 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!
We can lament the current state of affairs, but let's not pretend it's abnormal.
Self-funded sustainable businesses can be much more stable in the long term.
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?
> 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?
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.
I don't think profit plays a big role.
“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?
So frustrating as a user.
Everything as SaaS web apps is just yet another chapter in the enshittification of tech.
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
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.
* Please open source it! *
This is the best conclusion for everybody involved.
Patent indemnification is not your problem, it's the problem of whoever wants to use the code.
> 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.
Why wouldn't they use that to sell another round to bridge?
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.
They focused on the wrong thing, spent too much money and decided to call it quits.
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.
