Why I'm Shutting Down Taleshape Cloud

Nov 11, 2026 - 4 min read

A few months ago I launched a Cloud offer — a hosted version of Shaper where you could sign up and get a managed instance.

The “Cloud” was really just a signup form. I then set up instances manually for people who were interested. I shared it on LinkedIn and was happy to see that some of you were actually interested and wanted to try it out.

But building a complete self-serve Cloud product requires a lot more work than adding a few more features to open source Shaper. Billing, onboarding, provisioning, multi-tenancy, auto-scaling.

In the months after the Cloud launch, I saw something else happening:

What actually worked

I started getting more customers for my original service offering: helping companies run Shaper in their own infrastructure and integrate it into their product.

I started to see a clear pattern. The companies turning to Shaper are in healthcare and other regulated industries. They want embedded analytics dashboards as code and need complete data sovereignty. They want to use AI to build analytics but can’t send data to third-party vendors.

This is the use case I had in mind from the beginning when I started building Shaper. And getting more customers confirmed it. So I want to focus on what’s working instead of trying to build for multiple use cases in parallel.

Narrowing my focus

So I decided to double-down on the original idea. From now on Taleshape has a single offer: managed hosting and hands-on support for companies that want help running Shaper and building with it.

We deploy Shaper in your infrastructure, handle security monitoring, and deliver updates as Pull Requests you review. And we help with integrations, dashboard development, and compliance.

All features stay open source

From the start I’ve been adding features to Shaper that alternative tools only offer in their enterprise editions — SSO, embedded analytics with row-level security, white labeling. I considered creating a separate, paid version, but I never did. I knew it would make things more complex and as a solo developer I couldn’t afford complexity.

Now I’m making this more explicit. There is no paid edition of Shaper. Every feature is and stays open source. What my customers actually pay me for is the service around it: personal support, fast issue resolution, compliance consultation, help integrating Shaper into their product, and prioritizing features — not access to functionality.

I think this is the right approach. The open source project gets stronger. Guaranteed no vendor lock-in. No conflict of interest between the open source project and the business. And the service I offer is still valuable on its own.

Looking for platform partners

I know there is genuine interest in an easy-to-use, self-serve platform around Shaper’s “Dashboards as SQL” approach.

But instead of trying to build that myself, I’m looking for companies building data platforms that might want to offer Shaper as part of their hosted product.

If that’s you, please reach out!

What’s next

If you’re in healthcare or another regulated industry and looking for help implementing embedded analytics with full data sovereignty, let’s talk.

And if you just want to build dashboards with SQL on your own server or laptop, Shaper is free and open source. Every feature included.

Thank you!
Jorin