Today I have sad news to share. After more than seven years of development, the company behind RethinkDB is shutting down. We worked very hard to make RethinkDB successful, but in spite of all our efforts we were ultimately unable to build a sustainable business. There is a lot of information to unpack – over the next few months, I’ll write about lessons learned so the startup community can benefit from our mistakes.

I just installed RethinkDB 2.3.5 on a new laptop and took a few minutes to slow down and play with the product. I’m very proud of what we built alongside our community – RethinkDB’s technology more often feels like magic, and I hope it will continue to play an important role in advancing the state-of-the-art in database technology.

We’re working with members of our community to develop a continuity plan for RethinkDB and Horizon. Both projects will continue to be available, distributed under open source licenses. We hope to continue our open development process with a larger community of contributors.

We’d like your help to ensure RethinkDB’s future as an open-source project! We don’t have all of the details figured out, but we wanted to be as open as possible during this process. If you’re interested in contributing, please join us in the #open-rethinkdb channel of our public Slack group. You can expect to see development slow down in the meantime, but everything will continue to be available on rethinkdb.com and horizon.io. We will post updates on our blog and Twitter as we continue working things out.

With the company shutting down, we also wanted to find a new home for our team. We looked at a number of options, and were deeply impressed by Stripe – in particular, their commitment to building better developer tools, contributing to the open source community, and helping technology companies to scale faster and more effectively. We’re excited that the members of our engineering team will be joining Stripe, where we can put our expertise to work solving new problems and building infrastructure for developers around the world. Between now and when the team joins Stripe, they will help us with with our efforts to establish a sustainable future for RethinkDB as an independent open-source project.

Thank you for standing with us over the years.