HN Explorer

Clara.io Shutting Down

78 points by tarr11 ↗ HN
Received this email today:

Hi Clara User,

This is a notice that we are retiring the Clara product and services on December 31, 2022.

If you have files that you would like to continue using, please download that content before December 31, 2022 because it will not be available after.

We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for using Clara.

Sincerely,

Clara Admin Team

35 comments

[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 93.1 ms ] thread
bhouston
This is true. I will post a post-mortem on it as some point in the next month. But I can confirm that we are shutting it down:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@BenHouston3D/109445706917253...

We (Exocortex.com) started Clara.io in 2012, launched it in 2013. But we stopped work on it in 2015. We then launched Threekit.com, which was originally built upon Clara.io tech, but then we rebuilt the tech stack to better suit the commercial product visualization market needs. Eventually Exocortex renamed itself Threekit as it was a viable future. Under the Threekit brand we have raised $65M and have grown to 100 employees.

So the company behind Clara.io, Exocortex, has grown and is succeeding, but Clara.io never really made any money in its original mission as an online 3D editor. It is filled with +1M free users. We kept it running for 7 years after we had stopped development, but at some point you have to call it. It is hard to keep such an old tech stack running (it used pre 1.0 Node.js originally and still uses a highly modified 2012-era Backbone.js as React hadn't been invented yet.)

tomp
Why not open-source it?
Benjamin_Dobell
Nothing to add on Clara.io. However, just wanted to state that Ben Houston is/was one of the more prolific three.js contributors (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/graphs/contributors) and consistently pushed three.js in a better direction. Thank you!
bhouston
Thanks! In many ways Mrdoob's Three.js was critical to Clara.io working. His leadership of Three.js over the past decade has transformed online 3D. And the community around Three.js was critical to it actually working. WebGL was so buggy on devices in 2013-2015 that it was only through joint community effort that we were about to work around those device-specific bugs.
techsavygamer0
Hey Ben - thoughts on WebGPU support, and the potential for a web-based metaverse?
bhouston
I think success in a web-based metaverse isn't likely dependent upon technology, but rather figuring out how to appeal to users. But Rust/WASM+WebGPU can be very efficient. But building your own engine from scratch is not a minor undertaking.
bhouston
Fun fact, a lot of it is open source, just not where you would expect it. During the creation of Clara.io I created over 200 PRs to Three.js:

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3A...

Open sourcing it wholesale at this point is a challenge because parts of the tech stack became parts of Threekit.com. Threekit.com is VC funded and an ongoing business operation.

I do what I can with open source still, see:

https://github.com/bhouston/behave-graph

https://github.com/threeify/threeify

MuffinFlavored
If 20,000 people are using it a month, why not ask some of them to pay?
bhouston
We did. https://clara.io/pricing. It was incredibly ineffective.
brutus1213
Thank you for being so forthright. I'm curious if you considered lowering the price to where it became stupidly obvious for a user to get. E.g. 1 dollar a month (or year). I recall Whatsapps early pricing model where I'd never pay for a paid messaging app personally, but since it was free the first whole year and 1 dollar a year after, it seemed essentially free.

When I see something that's 10 dollars a month (100 w/ year discount), I think of the higher number as the price (x1.5-x2).

I can see the danger of devaluing the product, not covering costs, etc. but am curious if a price point between free and monthly exists .. ultra-good-value? Use that to bring in some recurring revenue, and grow from that base.

If you have thoughts on this, would appreciate hearing them.

bhouston
I think the main issue was that we were very popular with students and dabblers. They were not using our tool to make money. Thus they were not very easy to provide value that would justify them paying. It just a horrible market to serve if you want to make any money.
mrtksn
Wouldn't someone be interested in taking over? The domain name itself should be worth something too, it's a beautiful name.
bhouston
Name of my first daughter, Clara, who was born roughly around the time of launch. :)
danrocks
I wish I could pay you a beer to hear the whole story in person.
famahar
So every 3D model not downloaded by the end of the year will disappear? 100000+ models that can help hobbyist creators build their dream project. I'm sure there are archivists that would gladly save them all so others can use them, but 1 month is quite a deadline. It's sad to see such a large amount of resources just disappearing
tomcam
Reading through your answers I’m hugely impressed by your honesty and forthrightness. Hoping Threekit gets huge.
eerikkivistik
Sad to see it go, but I perfectly understand. You may or may not remember, but we had a chat about some of the backing tech about 5 years ago. I am one of the founders of 3dc.io and we are shutting it down for similar reasons. Ironically our tech stack behind both products is pretty identical.
bhouston
Yeah unfortunately nearly every company that tried to be a general web based 3D editor failed to find a market.

There is a new generation now out so it will be interesting to see how that goes: womp, spline.design and I guess vectary is still around. I think there is another recent one as well but I can’t remember the name.

I think the AI driven tools is the next hot area personally.

I think Blender is the real 3D editor that won over the last decade.

eerikkivistik
For not fully featured 3D editors (which takes so much work, I won't even get started), I think the trick would be to bundle it with something that uses the output and that part generates the revenue. Roblox is a great example of that.
astlouis44
Are you talking about a platform/portal where the published 3D web content (games, simulations, virtual events) can be discovered and accessed by users?
eerikkivistik
I was more referring to having a second product, that leverages the first one. So for example, if you have a simple 3D editor that doesn't compete in features with high-end 3D editors. What you could do, is have a game, where amateur 3d users can use that tool to build content for their own world. That is why I mentioned Roblox as an example.
kaveh808
The solution might be to develop a niche modeling solution with appropriately high level tools for your domain, as opposed to a general polygon modeler.
Wingy
Most "real" modeling work on Roblox is done in Blender, exported to fbx, and imported to Roblox Studio. Complex models are typically not built in Studio.
sandkoan
Is there a particular reason that web-based 3d editors failed to find a market? Is it just that those working in the modelling space are already well-versed in actual editing tools, so they don't really have a need for something like this, while the average nontechnical/nonspecialist consumer has little reason to edit 3d? Because Figma seems to have taken off despite having largely a similar model.

Would a collaborative version of the 3d editor concept be more of a success?

bhouston
One major limitation is memory. The browser only gives you about 1gb of memory to play with. But blender lets you play with as much as you have on your device. As well multithreading is limited or very difficult in the browser. On desktop it is a lot more flexible.

Also we are competing now with Blender which is fast moving and free. Blender is now a seriously alternative to 3Ds max and Maya.

A web based editor is at many disadvantages.

Figma isn’t competing with an effective open source tool. Also its resource requirements are much lower so it isn’t limited. Its market is also larger.

Not saying it is impossible to compete but it isn’t simple. Even if you are feature competitive, which is hard, you are likely slower and more resource constrained and also how can you charge much if Blender is free? Paying for an inferior experience? That is a hard sell.

brutus1213
Good points. One way to compete with blender could be simplicity. I want to encourage myself and my wife+7 year old to get into 3 D modeling (basic level stuff so we have fun with it in VR/AR or maybe print out models). It all seems a bit inaccessible without some serious effort. When there are too many features, taking some out + not having to do an install is compelling.
bhouston
A simple product though won't likely be used commercially by professionals, and then you are stuck at the low end serving students/dabblers, which is not a place were you will make much money. Remember for software tools, it is usually only those who are making money using your tool who are willing to pay for it.
touchpadder
Same issue in progress here! I've been working for a few years on an editor(forked from Three.js editor) for my browser game bad.city and now I'm separating the editor, rewrote it in react and the current goal is making an easy-to-start-with game level editor with many assumptions. We'll see how that goes
kaveh808
We are developing an open source 3D system, and what could set it apart from existing tools such as Blender is an interesting question. In our case we are taking a different tack by developing in Common Lisp, which will give us a powerful REPL and whole-system extensibility.

Though the web was a tempting platform, we are keeping it as a desktop app for now. Based on the comments I read here that may have been a wise decision.

We shall see if there is a niche for a system such as ours.

A brief trailer: https://youtu.be/i0CwhEDAXB0

tamat
WebGLStudio creator here, yup, there is no market for generic 3D solutions. You need to find a very specific niche to have some revenue.
AgusEchenique
Upon receiving the email, I google it and then got here. This discussion is sad but very informative for me because we are building a platform for users to create, share and embed web based 3D experiences. But based on the experience we had in the past with clients, we stablished some main rules: - it has to be simple: users don't need to be well versed in 3D. - it has to be complementary to well stablished 3D tools: blender, maya, etc. - it has to be, whenever posible, engine agnostic: three.js handles the import/creation stage, but from there, you should be able to populate experiences in any web based engine or framework. After reading this insightfull discussion, it's clear that we're walking a thin and blury line. We're still in early stages, so I would be gratefull if you guys could tell me what you think about our project. Thanks in advance :)
badungus
Man, that’s a real bummer. This is the website I would always use to model things with on the crappy school computers. I’ve made lots of things with clara.io and it’s sad to see it go.