Looking at this dry official offline notice, who could have imagined its former glory?
It’s been cloudy all day in Shanghai, the temperature is mild, making it perfectly suited for slacking off a bit on the balcony. While scrolling through my phone just now, I stumbled upon a piece of news that barely made a splash: Sina Cloud has announced that due to business adjustments, it will permanently go offline on September 16 this year.
Ordinary netizens probably wouldn’t bat an eye at this, but in many group chats of veteran programmers, it likely sparked a wave of cyber condolences. After all, this is the place that carried the youth of China’s first generation of “wild developers.”
The Years We Earned “Cloud Beans” Together
There’s a very interesting phenomenon. Nowadays, whenever people build an application, they frequently have to buy expensive server resources. If traffic suddenly spikes, a pay-as-you-go bill could literally cost you your house when you wake up. But in the Chinese internet of over a decade ago, there was a true “free lunch.”
At the time, Sina Cloud’s star product was SAE (Sina App Engine). To attract users, they invented an incredibly down-to-earth virtual currency—Cloud Beans. The amount of traffic you consumed running code on the platform didn’t cost real money; it simply deducted Cloud Beans.
The most amazing part was that these Cloud Beans could be earned for free, much like doing daily quests in online games.
Real-name authentication gifted you a few hundred, and if you were willing to write a blog post recommending the platform, you could get a reward. More exaggeratedly, even if you did absolutely nothing but log in daily to sign in, the system would generously stuff a handful of beans into your account. I was chatting about this over dinner with a tech guru before; he smiled brightly and said that back then, he literally set alarms to sign in daily for free beans, keeping his personal small website running steadily for years without spending a single dime.
This wasn’t just about exploiting freebies; at the time, it even formed a self-circulating economic system.
You read that right. Back then, Cloud Beans could be transferred back and forth between accounts. In many tech forums, you’d often see people posting for help, saying their website was about to be suspended and begging whales to tip some beans. The reply section below was usually incredibly heartwarming, with a bunch of kind-hearted passersby genuinely transferring dozens or hundreds of beans to them.
Calculating how many beans were consumed today and how many days their little treasury could last became a daily required course for countless poor students and grassroots entrepreneurs. To save the daily expense of a few dozen beans, developers back then took frugality to the extreme. Code that could have been written casually was meticulously optimized word by word, for fear that an extra database query would cause their Cloud Beans to evaporate at the speed of light.
There’s an old running joke—I’m not sure if you’ve heard it—about a guy who just started learning to program. He wrote such terrible code that it caused an infinite loop. When he woke up the next morning, the Cloud Beans he had painstakingly saved up for half a year had been directly deducted into the negatives. He broke down on the spot.
For the Non-Techies: What Exactly is SAE?
At this point, you might be curious: isn’t it just a website where you can get free stuff? Why was everyone so obsessed with this platform back then?
Because at that specific juncture in 2009, SAE was simply an epoch-making monster. It was China’s first PaaS cloud computing platform.
You likely don’t understand what PaaS means. You can think of it as a “move-in ready furnished apartment.”
In the past, if someone wanted to build a website on the internet, they first had to buy a physical machine as a foundation. Then, they had to install the OS themselves and configure complex databases and runtime environments. For liberal arts students or average college kids who only knew how to write a couple of lines of simple code, the barrier to entry was higher than the sky. Alternatively, you could buy those cheap virtual hosts, but those things were absolute traps. Not only did they crash every other day, but the service providers would sometimes forcibly stuff Macau casino pop-up ads into the corners of your web pages.
But Sina Cloud took care of all this dirty and exhausting work.
You didn’t need to understand low-level commands; you just needed to bring your luggage—meaning those few lines of code—move right in, and start cooking immediately. Even the databases and storage spaces were pre-configured by the officials in the background. At that time, there wasn’t a GitHub community as developed as today’s. Everyone was using the ancient SVN tool, huffing and puffing as they pushed code onto SAE. Bam! Upon successful upload, your little website was accessible to the whole world.
Back then, this was truly a magical experience. Sina’s engineers essentially handed a ready-made megaphone to anyone who wanted to make their voice heard on the internet.
The Wild Era of “Wild Programmers”
Actually, similar things happened later. After Sina SAE became popular with this trick, Baidu got jealous and hurriedly launched BAE (Baidu App Engine). For a time, domestic internet giants actually started competing over “who can provide developers with a better free lunch.” Those were the happiest years for grassroots webmasters.
Back then, smartphones were just beginning to popularize, and WeChat Official Accounts were still a novelty. People had all sorts of fun ideas brewing but nowhere to execute them. For instance, someone used SAE to write an auto-sign-in script for Baidu Tieba, benefiting a huge crowd of netizens too lazy to clock in every day. Others casually built early WeChat bots capable of checking the weather and chatting with people, hosting them on the platform. Even some college students used the platform’s free quotas to wildly grow tools for their graduation projects, like automated schedule checkers for the university’s academic affairs office.
People weren’t seriously “building industries”; they were purely just “playing.”
Truth be told, nostalgia is one thing, but commercially, the math definitely didn’t add up. After burning money for a few years and fattening up a massive batch of users accustomed to freebies, Sina Cloud found itself in a stalemate. Later, true leviathans like Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud entered the fray, directly washing the market in blood with brutal price wars. Further on, new technologies like Docker emerged. People realized they could package their code into a black box and run it anywhere, no longer needing to be locked into any specific outdated platform.
At this point, SAE was like a stubborn old man insisting on using a Nokia, only able to watch helplessly as he was abandoned by the times.
You see, sometimes trainwrecks in the tech circle are quite bloody and dramatic. But a platform like Sina Cloud, which didn’t crash but merely quietly fell behind, carries a somewhat lamentable sense of destiny. It managed to endure for nearly 17 years before officially announcing its curtain call. In the internet circle, where a new trend emerges every six months, its lifespan is practically comparable to a grand old tortoise (￣▽￣).
Alright, Meeting Adjourned
If you browse major communities now, you can still see some veterans looking everywhere for places to back up their old code left on the platform over a decade ago. Although that code might seem laughably childish today, for many, it was their very first way of saying hello to the world.
To be honest, after all this talk, if I hadn’t accidentally seen this offline notice today, I would have thought it had shut down long ago. Times have indeed changed. Now, even a name full of grassroots flavor like “Cloud Beans” has become an antique. Nowadays, everyone is talking about computing power and large language models. The days of giggling foolishly all day over writing two lines of code, and bragging to friends for half a day over a few cents worth of server resources, are ultimately gone forever.
Alright, enough talking, I’m going to eat. Back in the day, did you guys ever exploit similar cyber freebies anywhere to tinker with some little inventions?
References:
- Sina Cloud Services Announces Permanent Shutdown on Sept 16, Halts New User Registrations – Sohu
- 17 Years of SAE Comes to an End: What Happened to Those “Freeloaded” Online Projects? – Sohu
—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ.
