AppGratis

Hi everybody –

After 7 years of operating AppGratis and more than 50 millions installs globally we’re shutting down the service today.

What happened?

In preparation for the shutdown weeks ago, our team wrote a very thorough post-mortem of our journey. It told the whole story, Hemingway-style: successes and failures, mistakes and learnings, joys and disappointments…

Maybe a little too thorough? No matter how hard we polished it, the piece felt lengthy and quite frankly slightly boring. Post-mortems are all the rage these days anyways, aren’t they?

So we decided to keep it short.

As a parting gift to all the startups folks out there, here’s two interesting facts and the best piece of advice we could come up with after 7 years of running the same business:

- Fact n°1: startups are hard, with no guarantees of success.

- Fact n°2: startups take a big chunk of your life, so know why you’re in it.

- Advice: remember people will give you advice, and often they’re wrong.

7 years…. AppGratis lived, AppGratis died. It was an OK product with a strong first-mover’s advantage in a time of novelty. Some people liked it, some didn’t, but that doesn’t matter anymore. The world evolved and so have we. We had ups and downs, we were a passionate bunch, we had fun and we were very, very lucky—until we weren’t so lucky anymore, but we didn’t quit. We kept our stick on the ice and ultimately made it through to a new project that’s taking off nicely. And that’s now where we want to dedicate all our efforts.

This is why this story ends today, with no regrets and much learnings.

Thank you to all of you who worked with us!

… helped us!

… cheered at our jokes!

… and downloaded our apps!

Speak soon.

– The AppGratis team

Adrien, Alejandro, Alex, Aline, Altaf, Andrea, Antoine, Arnaud B, Arnaud BM, Baptiste, Benjamin, Benoit, Bruno, Carol, Chloé, Christelle, Christine, Clément, Cédric, Daniele, David, Eleonora, Florent, Florian, Franck, Gabriel B, Gabriel G, Garry, Giuseppe, Hadrien, Hayden, Helen, Hugo, Jack, Jean-Baptiste, Jeannette, Jihyun, Joanna, Jose, Julie, Jérémy, Kinley, Kris, Laura, Loris, Lou, Louisa, Louise, Lourdes, Lucas, Lukas, Maelle, Marie, Michel, Mikail, Nancy, Natalya, Nicolas, Paul, Pierre, Rafael, Raphaël, Roisin, Ruri, Réjane, Rémi, Rémy, Sam, Sean, Shu, Simao, Simon, Simone, Sirag, Sofia, Stefan, Steffen, Stéphane, Stéphanie, Sylvain, Sébastien, Tanguy, Thierry, Valentina, Veronica, Vincent & Vlademir.

AppGratis was made with ❤️ in Paris & Lyon, France 🇫🇷