Why I'm Shutting Down 1000 Checkboxes

I'm shutting down 1000 Checkboxes - the globally-synced checkbox game built with HTMX.

In this post I'll share what's changing, why, and the future of checkboxes.

What is 1000 Checkboxes?

1000 Checkboxes was a website that displayed 1000 checkboxes. These checkboxes were synced globally - so if you check a box, everyone else will see that box as checked.

Under the hood it's SSR HTML served with F# / Giraffe and uses HTMX to handle the checkbox refreshes.

For more on how it's built - see the launch post.

Why I'm shutting it down

At the end of every year I review my projects and decide what I want to work on and shut down. 1000 Checkboxes ended up on the list of things to close.

There are few reasons for this:

• Cost - Hosting a site like this is pretty cheap, especially since I self-host on a VPS with Coolify, but it's not zero.
• Simplicity - Every bit of code you have in prod incurs a bit of overhead if you ever need to fix / update it. 1000 Checkboxes isn't getting much traffic so I don't think the ROI is worth it.
• There's a better version out there - One Million Checkboxes is basically an upgraded version with 1000x more checkboxes so there's not much reason to keep both running.

So I'm shutting down 1000 Checkboxes.

What if I still want to check boxes?

Oh wow, you really like to check boxes, huh?

Never fear! One Milion Checkboxes is ready and willing to serve all of your box checking needs. In fact 1000 Checkboxes should redirect to it - assuming I've set up these url redirects correctly.

So box checking can continue - there will just be more than 1000 boxes.

Next

Thanks to everyone who checked boxes - here's to more checking in the future.

If you liked this post you might also like:

• One Million Checkboxes - Globally Synced Data with HTMX
• The State of HTMX (2024)
• The HAM Stack - A Simple Scalable Tech Stack for building modern web apps fast and cheap