Clara.io, a decade old browser based 3D modelling application, is being shut down on December 31st, 2022. We first covered Clara all the way back in 2016 and honestly, not much has changed since then, which is a big part of why it is being shut down. In addition to the 3D application being shuttered, so is the massive library of free 3D models.
While the website Clara.io makes no mention of the looming shutdown, users were emailed about the upcoming closure. One of the founders made the following post over on Mastodon:
Ben also made further clarifications in the following Hacker News thread:
We (Exocortex.com) started Clara.io in 2012, launched it in 2013. But we stopped work on it in 2015. We then launched Threekit.com, which was originally built upon Clara.io tech, but then we rebuilt the tech stack to better suit the commercial product visualization market needs. Eventually Exocortex renamed itself Threekit as it was a viable future. Under the Threekit brand we have raised $65M and have grown to 100 employees.
So the company behind Clara.io, Exocortex, has grown and is succeeding, but Clara.io never really made any money in its original mission as an online 3D editor. It is filled with +1M free users. We kept it running for 7 years after we had stopped development, but at some point you have to call it. It is hard to keep such an old tech stack running (it used pre 1.0 Node.js originally and still uses a highly modified 2012-era Backbone.js as React hadn’t been invented yet.)
So if you have content up on Clara.io you have only a little over a week remaining to download it. You can learn more about Clara.io and it’s upcoming shutdown in the video below.