Bike Citizens filed for bankruptcy

A couple of days the news came in that the company behind the app Bike Citizens (originating in Graz) and various other utilities around biking is broke. According to this article on Brutkasten while the filing for bankruptcy mentions no planned business continuation, there might still be a chance as there are talks going on with some potential investors.

In case you’ve never heard of this app, it’s basically a map application optimized for bicycle riders where you can, for instance, configure that you have an e-bike and can therefore better deal with slight inclines. Combined with the smartphone mount Finn this offers a nice package!

Sadly, the app doesn’t offer all that many useful features beyond the core routing and even multi-point routing is locked behind a subscription. Combined with some recent server stability issues I had somehow already gotten the impression that something might be going on here. Keeping servers maintained over the weekends usually isn’t that hard with a bit of redundancy and on-call employees. If there’s no money for even that…

Too bad, I really liked the idea behind the app and Bike Citizens as a whole. If they manage to survive this, I hope there will be some money for a slightly more feature-rich application 🙂