It is with a heavy heart that I am announcing the end of Stickler-CI.
On April 30 2023, we'll be stopping paid subscriptions. However, reviews on private repositories will continue to be processed. Then, on May 31 2023 all reviews will stop being processed.. Stickler CI will remain available in a read only fashion until June 30 2023.. After that, login will cease to work and the site will fall off the internet.
This change is being made because I no longer have the time or passion to maintain and deliver Stickler-CI at the level my current customers deserve. Instead of letting the service languish until customers are frustrated and disappointed, I would rather go out on a more positive note.
I'd like to thank everyone who has trusted me to do help keep your code in good shape and help you improve your teams' processes. If you need any help during this process I'll do my best to help with what I can. Feel free to contact me via support at stickler-ci.com
7 years ago, I had started building an open-source project to automate the style checking and automatically formatting code during pull requests. I needed this to automate the tedious parts of code review while also trying to eventually get to a consistent code style. After seeing the success of this project at FreshBooks and that I was able to attract a handful of other contributors, I wanted to see if others would be interested in this kind of service. Would anyone be interested? Would anyone pay for it?. It was these questions that led to me building Stickler-CI.
In 2017 I had built a prototype and gotten some help from my now former co-workers Jeremy and Tara. With their help I was able to get a more consistent brand identity and tone. Furthermore, we had talked to users and gotten early validation that this was a product developers were interested in and would pay for. Within a few months, Stickler was covering it's hosting costs and within a couple of years it was profitting a few hundred dollars a month. However, that was where it would peak. The first signs of trouble came when GitHub release GitHub Actions. Shortly after that the burgeoning ecosystem included coverage for all of the same linters were available. GitHub and its ecosystem of In 2020, during the pandemic many of Stickler's customers needed to cut costs, and Stickler was one of those costs. Combined with my lack of ability and interest to figure out how to acquire new customers beyond word of mouth and social media mentions, this drop in revenue really impacted my interest and motivation. For the past few years I've been doing regular updates to keep tools current and systems maintained, but there haven't been any new linters added or new functionality added. As 2023 began, my heart was no longer in Stickler CI and I came to the hard decision of shutting it down instead of letting it decay and become a dissapointment.
Once the service does go away, the core of it will continue to be available as an open-source project at lint-review . I'll do my best to answer issues and get pull requests merged if there is interest.