The Instant team joins OpenAI

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The Instant team joins OpenAI<br>Instant2 min read

We have a big announcement to make today: the Instant team is joining OpenAI.

We started Instant to make it easy for you to build delightful apps. Over the last few years we saw that most of our users began to use Instant through agents. Agents already empower many of us to build more ambitious things, and we’re only at the beginning stages of what they can do. We are excited to join OpenAI and bring intelligence to as many people as we can.

If you are a user of Instant Cloud, this is what the news means for you:

New signups are closed. Existing users should migrate off of Instant Cloud within the next 12 months. Any subscriptions that were started after July 31st, 2026 will be fully refunded.

On August 31st, 2027, all cloud apps will shut down. Backups will stay available for 12 more months, until August 31st, 2028.

We’ve written a guide to help you self-host Instant and migrate your apps too. All of Instant is open source, and we’ve worked to make the migration process as seamless as possible.

The idea behind Instant started in 2021. We shared a blog post about a database in the browser. It was only an idea, but the more apps we built, the more we saw the need for it. We joined YC in 2022, built a prototype, and shared a version zero.

Turning a prototype into something production-grade was a long journey. The work was hard, but there were many moments of joy. [1] Very early on Daniel joined the team and helped solve some of the gnarliest problems in sync tech. Our community grew, more folks joined [2], and we officially open sourced. From there it was a maelstrom of feedback and making Instant better. When time came to really make our TypeScript SDKs ergonomic, Drew joined the team and did just that. From there, over 17,000 users got to try Instant. They made 400,000 apps, and those apps processed about 2.5 billion transactions.

If you are an Instant customer, it’s been an honor building for you.

(Right to left) Joe Averbukh, Stepan Parunashvili, Daniel Woelfel, Drew Harris

Footnotes

One time we shared a post on X, where colors synced in React Native. We were so excited at the milestone, that we think our smile might have gotten the post to go viral. ↩

Thank you for your contributions Mark Shlick, Nikita Prokopov, and Alex Reichert! ↩