[Disclaimer: Co-founder of
https://www.bitrise.io , one of the alternatives mentioned on ship.io 's page]
Back when we started only a handful of CI services were available for iOS developers. One of them was CISimple which was later aquired and rebranded as ship.io . Our motivation to start our own service was that none of the available hosted services at the time were flexible enough to handle the projects we were working on.
Ship.io did improve a lot, allowing custom scripts to be executed, but, at least for us, they always seemed to be too locked down, too much of a black box.
This is exactly why we recently introduced our [open source CLI](https://github.com/bitrise-io/bitrise), so that you can run your CI and other automation configurations on your own machine if you want to, and of course in the (highly unlikely ;) case we would decide to close the shop you can still export your configuration and run it anywhere you want to.
I remember, just a few months ago, we felt that ship.io had a spy in our team, as they introduced new features almost at the same time we did (Slack support, Deliver support, ...).
It's surprising they closed so quick, they had quite an active marketing team and released new features frequently. I guess this decision was not up to the people who actually worked on the product, most likely they failed to meet the (monetary) expectations of their parent company.
Fairwell old friend, we'll always remember you!