Squarespace buys Dropbox-powered site builder Brace to expand its developer tools

Squarespace is acquiring the team behind Brace, a minimalistic website building service powered by Dropbox and Amazon’s cloud, the companies announced today.

With this deal, Squarespace plans to bolster its “developer workflow” and eventually convince more third-party developers to use its flagship site builder. That’s no easy task; site makers often pit themselves against developers as a cheaper alternative, but Squarespace apparently wants to turn those connotations around and strengthen its own developer ecosystem.

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In a blog post on the deal, Brace details that it will no longer accept new users starting today, and existing users have until early next year to find a new service (cough, cough, Squarespace). With the shutdown, Brace also plans to open source some of its “free tools for forms, charts, and data.”

Squarespace says it will work with the Brace team to “enhance our own developer workflow, and to create other beautifully simple experiences within the Squarespace platform.”

This deal follows the launch of Squarespace 7, the seventh major iteration of the company’s site builder tool. That update introduced a new editing interface with more in-context WYSIWYG editing, support for Google Apps-powered email, integration with Getty Images (selling images at $10 a pop), the ability to create splash pages, and 15 new templates.