The blog post doesn't mean anything. HN is full of congratulatory posts of acquihires. They're all the same. "Now that we're part of $BIGCO we'll be working to integrate our technology into $BIGCO."

It never happens.

If $BIGCO had any intent to keep the product along, you'd be reading the post on $BIGCO's blog, not $FAILEDSTARTUP's blog.

Acquirers typically add terms to deal preventing vanity announcements and defining shutdown timeline. They don’t want the overhead of maintaining, or the negative brand hit. Each case is different, but there’s always a plan. They probably have some reason to keep maintaining the current customers/product, we can just guess what it is.

There is absolutely zero reason to believe that there is any plan to maintain this tiny product, let alone in any way to that is compatible with existing customers (if they exist).

Fig is only two, three years old at most.

> If it was just acquihire there probably wouldn’t have a big blog post tying it to AWS. Just negative publicity for acquirer when they could shut down quietly.

That’s a good point.

But what reason is there to disable new registrations?

Terms of the acquisition, most likely. Existing customers are worth $x/yr. New customers with the new product are worth $y/yr. Finance doesn't want $x competing with $y. Something something financial models making the deal worth what they paid, so closing registration is simply part of the deal that was signed.

They want to move the customers to a new AWS service (that will be this product rebranded with AWS) and tie into AWS infrastructure instead of using a special system for sign in.

By preventing sign ups, they fix the number of accounts that will need to be migrated in future.