We had 1M users, got acquired, and I still think we made the wrong call

I've been sitting on this post for months. Not because of the NDA, I can't share who acquired us or the terms, and I've made peace with that. I'm sitting on it because writing it means admitting something that still stings: I think we gave up too early.

Let me tell you what actually happened.

What Boringrats was

Boringrats wasn't a SaaS product trying to extract $29/month from someone's budget. It was something I wish had existed when I started out. A platform where small open source developers could collaborate, find jobs, and get real career guidance from actual working engineers. Not LinkedIn polish. Not fake "I'm hiring" posts. Real people, real advice, real signal.

We had 1M users. At peak, 200K people were active every single day. And we were completely broke.

The money problem nobody warns you about

Here's the thing about building something people love but don't pay for: the infrastructure bill doesn't care about your user count.

We ran on donations. People who believed in what we were building would send us money directly, and every single rupee of it went straight into keeping the servers alive. Not salaries. Not growth. Just staying on.

Serving 200K daily active users is not cheap. Kafka doesn't run on good intentions. The data pipelines I spent nights building, the ingestion layer, the analytics warehouse, the Airflow jobs stitching everything together, all of it costs real money to keep breathing.

My co-founder was handling community, social, fundraising. I was handling the entire backend and data infrastructure. Neither of us was sleeping enough. Neither of us was getting paid. And somewhere in the middle of all this, I had a B.Sc. to finish.

The timing was the worst part

My final year. Research due. Exams due. And I'm debugging a pipeline at 2am because a traffic spike broke something I built six months ago that was only ever meant to be temporary.

I was also deep into two research projects that actually mattered to me. One on making AI models honest about what they don't know, Aurora ART. Another on privacy-preserving API infrastructure using homomorphic encryption. Work that required the kind of focused attention you simply cannot give when you're also fielding server alerts at midnight.

Something had to give. We both knew it.

The email

We got a message from a company that had been watching Boringrats. They were interested in merging. We got on calls, talked numbers, talked about what the platform could become with real resources behind it. Somewhere in those conversations the framing shifted. Merger became acquisition. And eventually we said yes.

I can't tell you who they are. The NDA is real and I respect it. What I can tell you is that in November 2025, we signed, and Boringrats stopped being ours.

What happened to the users

This is the part I think about most.

After the acquisition, the platform was shut down. The community, the job guidance threads, the open source collaboration space, it all went dark. Before that happened we tried to do right by the people who had trusted us. We rerouted users as best we could, pointed them somewhere they could continue, tried to make sure nobody just hit a blank page one day with no explanation.

It wasn't perfect. When something you built for a million people disappears, there's no clean way to handle it. But we tried. I still think about those 200K people who showed up every day. I hope most of them found their way somewhere useful. I'm sorry we couldn't keep the lights on longer.

What I feel now

Relief was the first thing. I won't pretend otherwise. The financial pressure lifted overnight. I could sleep. I could focus on my degree. I could think about research without guilt.

But relief faded pretty quickly.

Because here's what I understand now that I didn't fully grasp then. The hardest problem in any product is getting people to genuinely care. 1M users who showed up because what we built actually meant something to them. That's not something you recreate on demand. You earn it slowly or you don't have it at all.

We had it. And we let it go because we couldn't afford the electricity bill. That's the part that still sits with me.

What I'm doing now

BSc is finishing. Aurora ART is the most interesting work I've ever done. The core idea is that AI systems should know when they're uncertain and say so, rather than giving you a confident wrong answer. We tested it properly. The results were real. A paper is coming.

I'm looking for what's next, data engineering or backend roles, ideally in the EU. Germany, Netherlands, Austria. I want to work on systems that matter, with people who care about getting things right.

And eventually, not now but eventually, I want to build something like Boringrats again. With funding this time. With patience to grow it properly instead of watching it quietly run out of runway.

The idea was right. The timing was wrong. I'm not done.

Reach me at swadhinbiswas.cse@gmail.com or on GitHub and LinkedIn.