Y Combinator-backed Omniref is shutting down on January 31, 2017

Omniref, a startup that developed a service for finding information about open-source software and adding notes to source code, has announced that it will shut down on January 31, 2017.

The startup stopped taking registrations earlier this month, and earlier this year it stopped charging customers, cofounder and chief executive Tim Robertson wrote in a blog post dated December 21.

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“This isn’t how we hoped things would turn out, but unfortunately, we were never able to find a sustainable business model that justifies the (considerable) expense of running the site. Because of the large number of developers who have come to depend on our services, we’ve kept things running for as long as we possibly could, but unfortunately, there no practical path forward from here,” Robertson wrote.

The startup released Chrome and Firefox browser plugins and had an integration with the GitHub source code repository software. On the Omniref website, developers could find documentation for and discuss Ruby and JavaScript code.

Omniref was founded in 2013 and based in San Francisco. It was part of accelerator Y Combinator’s winter 2015 batch. Cofounder and chief technology officer Montana Low left the startup in 2015 to join Instacart.