Nine years ago, we decided to launch a new free product alongside Buffer. We called it Pablo, and it was a huge hit in our community. Within just seven months of its launch, half a million photos were created using Pablo.
Similarly, we had the initial ideas for Stories Creator and Remix many years ago now. All three of these tools have been an important part of Buffer’s story. They’ve taught us lessons and helped us connect with a wider audience.
In Pablo’s case, the idea for this tool happened a decade ago. The landscape for these kinds of tools and Buffer’s own product have shifted so much in this time. We’ve been around for 14 years and building and maintaining a product for such a long time is at once a challenging and rewarding journey. We’ve recently been focused on modernizing all parts of Buffer, which we talked about a little when we released our new salary system.
Part of modernizing has been reflecting and taking a critical look at our current product. In a recent transparent discussion that was open to the whole team, we decided that some of the free tools we’d created long ago were no longer a priority for our product strategy and, as they were quite outdated, would be a huge investment to bring into 2024.
With that, we’ve decided to sunset three of our free tools: Pablo, Stories Creator, and Remix, as of November 10th, 2024.
Here’s a little more about that decision and what it means for you if you use these tools.
All of these tools are projects that our team hasn’t worked on for many, many years. Without attention from our team, we also saw interest in these tools diminishing. Very few people ever load Stories Creator and both Pablo and Remix have seen a downwards trend in traffic and downloads month-over-month. This could be seen in two ways — we aren’t promoting the tools since they are out of date, but we’re also not working on the tools actively in a way that would increase their use.
When we took the chance to reflect, our founder and CEO, Joel Gascoigne, made an excellent point:
There shouldn’t be any part of the product we neglect for a long time period (say, a year). If there is, it should be a strong contender for sunsetting. If we’re not regularly removing from the product as well as adding to it, then we will inevitably have growing complexity over time which goes against our goals for simplicity and high quality.
As with any long-term endeavor, there comes a time to prune back to help streamline our efforts everywhere else. We should be doing this kind of pruning regularly, but we’ve fallen out of practice.
Ultimately, sunsetting these tools pushes us towards a higher standard for our work at Buffer. By simplifying our tools, we can better focus on maintaining them and keeping our bar for quality high.
These tools were also all built on older code bases, and compared to their competitors, it would take a lot of work to bring them into 2024. That level of investment into these tools just doesn’t align with our current product strategy.
Looking ahead
While it’s always difficult to say goodbye to tools that have been part of our journey, we’re excited about what this means for the future of Buffer. We have a lot of big plans for new features and improvements to the product. If you’re curious about what’s coming next, we encourage you to follow along with our transparent roadmap.
What this means for you
If you’re currently using Pablo, Stories Creator, or Remix, here’s what you need to know:
- We will sunset Pablo and Stories Creator on November 10th, 2024 and they will no longer be available. There are plenty of other wonderful tools you can use to create images for social media. Our team loves using Canva to create images graphics. We have a helpful direct integration between Buffer and Canva to make it easier to add your graphics to Buffer after they’ve been created. Read all about the Buffer and Canva integration here.
- Remix will be removed from the app store on November 10th, 2024, although the app will still work if you have it downloaded on your device, we will no longer be building the product or providing customer support for the app.
Thanks for reading and for using these tools over the years, leave us a comment or reply on social media if you have any questions about these changes. We know that these tools have made an impact while they’ve been around and we can’t wait to keep building tools that empower small businesses, creators, and individuals to grow their brand online. ❤️
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