As some of you know, the Silk team joined Palantir over a year ago. We have maintained Silk as a free service to date. Unfortunately, we have decided to shutdown the service by December 15th, 2017.

Why?

It’s becoming harder and harder to keep Silk.co running without significant amounts of efforts and maintenance.

We’ve always intended to make Silk reliable, secure and free of bugs. We are no longer able to hold up to this standard.

Many of the third-party services we use to keep Silk.co running have been discontinued, changed or increased their pricing. In addition, security concerns and upcoming changes to legal frameworks for web services increased the liability of running Silk.co without active management.

What will happen next?

Your Silks will remain accessible until December 15th, 2017. After that date, your Silks will no longer be available and Silk.co will go offline.

You will be able to export all data from your Silks from your dashboard. Scroll down to the bottom of the settings page and use the “Download the .zip” button to export your entire Silk. You will receive a download link in your email after a few minutes. (Note: if you get a security warning in Chrome, please use another browser such as Firefox or Safari to access your dashboard).

We will maintain a backup of all data for another month, and will delete all data, including user data, no later than January 31, 2018.

Are there alternatives to Silk.co I can use?

While there is no tool that has an equivalent set of features as Silk, we can suggest the following options depending on your use case:

For creating visualizations, have a look at Plot.ly, RAWgraps, or Datawrapper.

For a tool to create dashboards with multiple visualizations, check out Google Data Studio.

The upcoming Coda looks like a promising tool to create interactive spreadsheets with.

Some of Silk’s data storytellers have been providing data cleaning and visualization services through their own agency. If you need their services, please contact support@silk.co and we’ll connect you with them.

Thank you so much for your support over the years.

The Silk team