GloriaFood post-mortem: what actually killed it

Hi, it’s Sharan.

On April 30th, 2027, GloriaFood shuts down. Over 100,000 restaurants will lose their ordering widgets, QR menus, customer lists and order history. Oracle isn’t giving anyone a migration tool or an export. When the servers go off, the data goes with them.

I recorded a short post-mortem on this, because I think most people are taking the wrong lesson from it.

The easy take is that Oracle killed GloriaFood. I don’t think that’s what happened. The shutdown was decided the day the pricing page said free forever.

Free ordering was a great way to sign up 100,000 restaurants. It was never a way to run a company. The product made no money of its own, so there was nobody inside Oracle with a reason to defend it. Development slowed. Then maintenance mode. Now a date.

The restaurants didn’t do anything wrong. They ran their daily operations on rails someone else could switch off. And someone did.

So here is the question I’d ask about every platform you depend on, including us: if this company disappears tomorrow, what do I keep? For GloriaFood users the answer was nothing. If that’s the answer you get, walk away, no matter who you’re talking to.

I broke the whole thing down in 60 seconds here: Watch the post-mortem

And if April 2027 is now your deadline, or you just don’t want to build on rented rails again, book a call with me. I’ll walk you through what moving to your own platform looks like, what it costs, and whether it even makes sense for your case.

Schedule a call with me

With Enatega you keep the code, the data and the customers. That’s the whole point.

Talk soon,
Sharan