We have written about the differences between a free service and a paid web scraping service previously.
Unfortunately, the 125,000 claimed “users” of Kimono Labs woke up to the rude realities of such a free web scraping service.
Kimono Labs, got acquired by Palantir and gave their “beloved users” just 2 weeks to find an alternative.
The free service will shut down on Feb 28 2016, without any care for their users – the idea probably being – “Why care, they never paid for it anyway“.
This sentiment was the core of our argument for a free vs paid service.
Hacker News has a thread about this and the comments echo some of the same sentiments.
It is ironic to hear that they “care deeply” about their users !
“Because of our new roles at Palantir, it will not be possible for us to continue providing the publicly available cloud hosted kimono product,” the team explains. I asked Ranade for more details about why the team decided on shutting the service down on such a short notice, but he declined to comment (“We care deeply about our users, but unfortunately I’m not at liberty to discuss the details.”)
On the other hand, when you pay for our service – we really do care about our “customers” (not “users”), so come on and join our family – we welcome you with open arms
