Cloud Collaboration for Distributed Teams, After InVision Shut Down

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InVision announced in early January 2024 that it was ending its design-collaboration services. Its support site told customers that documents would remain accessible only until 31 December 2024, with no extensions, no automatic data transfer and no bulk export. Any distributed team that had standardised on it had about twelve months to move a design history by hand. That is the first thing to understand about collaboration tooling for engineering teams spread across time zones: the tool is a dependency, and dependencies end. The companies worth studying are the ones still operating, and the most instructive of them publishes its own problems.

The migration deadline InVision set its own customers

Fast Company reported the shutdown and the trajectory behind it. InVision raised 1.5 million dollars in its first year in 2011, 45 million four years later and 100 million in 2017, reached unicorn status at a billion dollars and roughly two billion at its peak, and its decline is widely attributed to a failure to innovate after Figma emerged in 2016. For customers, the mechanics of the wind-down mattered more than the history. InVision’s own support material set the access cutoff at 31 December 2024 with no extensions, provided no automatic transfer and no bulk export, and noted that design system libraries could not be fully exported. Prototypes exported before the deadline continue to work locally.

The Freehand whiteboard product went to Miro. Miro’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, Jeff Chow, published the announcement on 4 January 2024: Freehand would be discontinued on 31 December 2024, Freehand elements would start appearing inside Miro from the first quarter of 2024, migration services would arrive by the summer, and existing Freehand subscriptions would be honoured at no additional cost. Miro cited 60 million users globally at the time. The migration had its own trap, documented by InVision: a Freehand migration token was valid for only two weeks from the date it was received, and tokens were discontinued after the cutoff date.

The practical lesson is not that InVision was badly run. It is that a distributed team’s shared context lives inside these products, and the exit terms are set by the vendor, at a moment of the vendor’s choosing, sometimes without a bulk export path. That belongs in a tooling decision alongside price and features.

GitLab’s numbers come from an annual report

GitLab is the most heavily documented all-remote software company, and the useful figures come from its Form 10-K rather than its marketing. For the fiscal year ended 31 January 2026, GitLab reported approximately 2,580 team members across 60 countries, revenue of 955.2 million dollars, up 26 percent from 759.2 million the previous year, a net loss of 56.0 million dollars, gross margin of 87 percent, 10,682 base customers, 1,456 customers at 100,000 dollars or more of annual recurring revenue and 155 at a million dollars or more, with customers in over 159 countries. The filing states the operating model directly: the company describes itself as remote-only and says it does not maintain a headquarters. Its public team page listed more than 2,500 people as of June 2026.

What makes GitLab worth studying is not the headcount but the documentation. Its handbook sets out handbook-first communication, in which written documentation takes precedence over synchronous meetings, and a formal guide to asynchronous and non-linear working. The term it uses for a fully remote workforce with no offices is all-remote, and it applies that term to itself in filings that carry legal consequences for inaccuracy.

The drawbacks GitLab documents about itself

The strongest counterweight to remote-work advocacy comes from the most prominent remote-work advocate. GitLab publishes a guide to all-remote work and its drawbacks, and the headings are not softened.

• Burnout, isolation and anxiety in the remote workplace
• The difficulty of informal communication
• The difficulty of collaborating and whiteboarding remotely
• The added complexity of remote onboarding
• Blurred work-life boundaries, including parenting as a remote worker

The office Automattic closed, and the money Zapier paid

GitLab also warns explicitly against the most common mistake, which is trying to replicate the in-office experience remotely. Two other companies illustrate what doing something else looks like. Automattic, founded in 2005 by Matt Mullenweg and the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr, closed its San Francisco headquarters in June 2017 along with co-working spaces near Portland, Maine and in Cape Town, the stated reason for the San Francisco closure being that its employees never showed up. It had roughly 1,200 employees by 2020. In August 2020 it built and released P2, a collaboration platform with a blog-like interface designed for asynchronous distributed teams, which is a checkable claim rather than a slogan: a distributed company that could not find the tool it needed wrote one. Its model was also documented from the inside by Scott Berkun in his 2013 participatory-journalism book about a year spent working at WordPress.com.

Zapier has never had offices. Founded in 2011 and launched in 2012 through Y Combinator, it reached roughly 700 employees across close to 40 countries as of August 2022, was valued at 5 billion dollars in a January 2021 secondary transaction, and has been profitable since 2014 on a single seed round of 1.2 million dollars raised in October 2012. Its most concrete published practice is the de-location package offered in March 2017: 10,000 dollars for employees willing to move out of the San Francisco Bay Area, with a one-year commitment. Roughly 150 people applied over a weekend.

Two caveats before those numbers are reused. The Automattic and Zapier headcounts date from 2020 and 2022 respectively and should be refreshed from the companies themselves before being quoted as current. And no peer-reviewed comparison of distributed and co-located software team productivity was found for this article, so nobody, including the companies above, is in a position to say the question is settled. What the record does support is narrower and more useful: several substantial software companies have run without offices for a decade or more, at least one of them files audited numbers while doing so, and that same one publishes a list of what the model costs.

Sources: Fast Company · InVision Support · Miro · StockTitan (GitLab Inc. Form 10-K) · GitLab · Wikipedia · Wikipedia