Startup Finally.io has shut down its web service for alerting developers to issues with popular cloud infrastructure services.

The startup, which early About.me employees Alex Bendig and Luke Gotszling established in San Francisco in 2013, removed its website from the Internet this afternoon. But the service really wound down at the end of 2014, Gotszling told VentureBeat in an interview.

In addition to sending alerts, Finally allowed developers to set "rules" for dealing with certain behaviors for commonly used services from Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and DigitalOcean. For instance, if EC2 CPU utilization went above a certain percentage, it was possible to automatically restart those instances, freeing up engineers to work on other things.

"We had no trouble getting companies to use it," Gotszling said. "We did have issues with getting companies to pay for it."

About 80 companies had used Finally's service but hadn't paid for it, Gotszling said. Finally never was able to pick up funding.

The shutdown comes amid the rise of monitoring companies like New Relic (which went public) and AppDynamics (which is planning to go public). That's not to mention other venture-backed startups like Boundary and the latest contender in the market, SignalFx.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, Amazon announced a feature called Auto Recovery that can automatically reboot instances in its cloud that fail.

But a bigger problem was that many companies didn't think they had to allocate money for services that could do what Finally could, even if end users did appreciate it.

"'We're already paying employees a lot of money, so why should we be paying a third party to do a lot of this really interesting work?'" said Gotszling, representing the thinking on the part of the people controlling corporate purse strings.

In a sense, people were philosophically open to paying for infrastructure monitoring tools -- just like people say they're willing to commit resources to documentation and code testing -- but in reality, getting companies to pay proved to be difficult.

Currently, Gotszling is spending his time on a new startup that will provide a service for natural language search. It's still in stealth mode, Gotszling said.

Some of the Finally technology will become available under an open-source license, Gotszling said.