With Gratitude We Say Goodbye: Sunsetting Begin

I am excited to announce that effective immediately, the Begin team is joining forces with Sanity to build out the world’s first Content Operating System. This is an amazing natural fit for our team’s experience with serverless compute and infra-as-code.

On January 1, 2025, we will be sunsetting Begin customer applications; this will include deactivating any apps hosted on the platform, and related services. However, Begin apps have always been based on completely open source software and are AWS compatible — and we have multiple resources available to aid you in a seamless transition.

Migrating to your own AWS account

Everything deployed with Begin Deploy can be deployed to any AWS account at any time with standard CloudFormation using OpenJS Architect. Read on to learn more.

Under the hood, Begin Deploy uses standard AWS CloudFormation, which is generated by Architect. Eight years old, stable, and licensed under Apache 2.0 with open governance, Architect will continue to be a solid and useful solution for many years to come. Architect offers developers terse, easy to write (and read) IaC that provisions serverless Functional Web Apps, with a super fast local development environment to boot.

Many Begin Deploy customers make use of Enhance, and thanks to WASM (and the good folks at Extism), today we can run Enhance in any backend environment. With Enhance, frontend teams can implement HTML first full stack web apps that not only work in every browser, but also any backend runtime, including: Rust, Go, PHP, Python, Ruby, and, of course, Node.js.

(While Begin is sunsetting, those of us who have been contributing to and building Architect and Enhance will continue to do so. They’re not going anywhere!)

Gratitude

First, I’d like to thank our team: Adam, Cole, Kristofer, both Ryans, Simon, and Taylor. Everyone on this team brought excellence, purpose, and dedication to their work every day.

Next, I’d like to thank every investor that participated in our journey, especially James, Tom, Dana, Joe and the rest of the team at Heavybit. You bet on us and stuck with us through thick and thin, the good, and the bad. As a founder, I am humbled.

Finally, I have to thank our customers. You have been our guiding light, and the reason everyone at this company showed up and did the excellent work they did. We couldn’t have done this without you, and for that I will always be grateful.

The explosive growth in dev tools today is directly related to frontend developers taking on responsibilities traditionally delegated to backend devs. We can’t know exactly what the future brings, but I am very certain it will involve open source, serverless, and web standards. Sanity is a perfect fit for the Begin team to continue building for that mission, we can see a clear path to bring our experience with cloud functions and infra-as-code to a unified engineering platform based on content as data. As ever, I’m very optimistic about the future and the superpowers this will unlock for developers.

Thank you,
Brian LeRoux, Cofounder/CEO