Appcanary, a Y Combinator-incubated service that helps developers scan the third-party packages and libraries they use to write their code for potential security vulnerabilities, today announced that it will shut down its service on June 1 and that the team is joining GitHub.
The two companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction, but our understanding is that this is primarily an acqui-hire.
“From when we cofounded Rubysec, to building (the now defunct) Gemcanary, to starting Appcanary, our goal from the beginning was to improve the world’s security by preventing the use of vulnerable software,” Appcanary founders Max Veytsman and Phill Mendonça-Vieira write in today’s announcement. “At the time, this required placing a bet on building a certain kind of business, and for a variety of reasons that bet didn’t work out.”
Before the acquisition, Appcanary charged users $29 per month to run up to three agents (to monitor three servers), with pricing going up from there.
It’s worth noting that GitHub, too, recently announced a similar feature that helps developers monitor their code for these kind of vulnerabilities. Unsurprisingly, the Appcanary founders note that they will work on “expanding GitHub’s security tooling,” including these previously announced features.
A GitHub spokesperson we heard from echoed the general theme of Appcanary’s announcement: “We are excited that the Appcanary team – Phillip Mendonça-Vieira and Max Veytsman – have joined the GitHub team. They will be bringing their expertise to the GitHub community, helping to enhance security offerings for our developer community. GitHub is committed to investment and development of additional functionality in the Security Alerts space.”
Come June 1st, Appcanary’s services will all shut down and the founders are directing users to services like Spacewalk, Landscape, CoreOS Clair, Nessus Agents and ThreatStack for their vulnerability scanning needs.