By Jason Snell

August 2, 2016 11:05 AM PT

So Kagi died…

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Kagi was, at one point, the way you bought Mac software that wasn’t from a major vendor and didn’t come in a box.

It’s been years and years since that changed, but Kagi was still out there, processing payments for shareware products. Until Sunday night, when it abruptly shut down. The company cited a decade-long struggle with “financial losses due to a supplier fraud situation” in the decision to close.

Developers were given no warning. (James Thomson posted a screen shot of him editing Kagi out of his Mac app DragThing using an OS 9 virtual machine, because the app’s text resources haven’t been changed in years.) For many, Kagi revenue has been small since a move to the Mac App Store or direct payment processing services like Stripe, but there were still apps using Kagi for payment. Thomson also says he’s heard that some developers are owed a whole lot of money from Kagi for transactions over the last month.

Anyway, it’s the end of an era. It’s just a shame the era is ending in such an ugly fashion.

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