In 2013 a startup named Layer was crowned the winner of the Techcrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield, taking home the coveted prize and $50,000 of winnings. They went on in the following years to raise almost $30 million dollars in funding over several rounds. Today (July 25, 2019), Shaun VanWeelden, Head of Layer, sent an email to Layer customers announcing that they are ceasing all chat operations on October 30th, 2019. This gives Layer customers just over 3 months to migrate off the platform and to another chat provider. Luckily, Stream has a Layer import tool to allow Layer customers to very quickly move to Stream Chat, the most fully-featured, scalable and highly performing chat solution in the market. We did a chat pricing comparison a while back to show you how we stack up to Layer.
Here are some highlights from Shaun’s email:
After October 30th, 2019, the Layer Platform and all services associated with Layer will be shut down in their entirety.
There will be no part of Layer online past this date and no option to continue leveraging the Layer backend services. Similarly, there is no way to take the Layer backend service and self-host it or for us to provide it to you.
Read the entire email with our thoughts on the Layer API Shutdown
Clearly, this is a big blow to current Layer customers, as they’re going to have to scramble to move off the platform and ensure there’s no interruption of service for their customers. While this shouldn’t come as a complete surprise since Layer has been warning customers of support challenges and risks for a while now, the abrupt announcement of a critical service going away in 3 months presents a major challenge.
Migrating from Layer to Stream
Stream powers activity feeds and chat for over 500 million end-users. We offer an automated migration process from Layer to Stream. You’ll also immediately benefit from tons of additional features, all included, at no additional cost.
We also make it crazy easy to integrate, with ready to go front end components in React, React Native, iOS and very soon native Android.
Let us know if you’d like to discuss your current Layer usage and we’ll be happy to talk through your requirements and help determine the quickest way to integrate with Stream. As a bonus, we’ll offer all current Layer customers a 25% discount off our list pricing for your first 12 months of subscription (just show us your most recent invoice from Layer). We’ll also create custom plan sizes to match your needs from Layer, simply scaling pricing from our Standard plan as needed.
This Github repo has detailed steps about how to export your layer data and migrate.