What happened to Gitpod: from cloud IDE to Ona and OpenAI

Gitpod was an open-source platform for cloud development environments. You put gitpod.io/# in front of a Git repository URL and Gitpod started a container with the repo checked out, ran the setup commands from a .gitpod.yml file in the repo, and opened VS Code in your browser. It launched in 2018, and by October 2024 the company reported 1.5 million users.

That Gitpod is gone for individual users. The company renamed itself Ona on 2 September 2025 and refocused on software engineering agents. It shut down the pay-as-you-go Gitpod Classic service on 15 October 2025, and on 11 June 2026 it announced an agreement to be bought by OpenAI for its Codex team. Ona's announcement page now says the deal closed on 10 August 2026.

Below is the dated timeline with a source for each step, what it means if you have Gitpod workspaces or a .gitpod.yml, and which tool replaces each thing people used Gitpod for. Facts are as of November 2026, from Gitpod's and Ona's own pages and press coverage.

What is Gitpod?

TypeFox, a software consultancy, announced Gitpod's public beta on 28 August 2018 as an online IDE for GitHub and other Git hosts: one click on an issue, a pull request or a branch opened a workspace for it. Gitpod was spun out of TypeFox as its own company in late 2020. Its source code is published on GitHub as gitpod-io/gitpod under the AGPL-3.0 licence, and Gitpod worked with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps.

A workspace was a container built from a Docker image, with your repository under /workspace. The .gitpod.yml at the repo root said how to prepare it:

tasks:
  - init: npm install          # setup: dependencies, builds, migrations
    command: npm run dev       # starts the app
ports:
  - port: 3000
    onOpen: open-preview

Tasks had three phases: before for preparation, init for setup that finishes, and command for the processes that keep running. Prebuilds ran before and init ahead of time, so a new workspace opened with dependencies already installed. Maintainers put a badge in their README that used the prefix:

[![Open in Gitpod](https://gitpod.io/button/open-in-gitpod.svg)](https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/OWNER/REPO)

What happened to Gitpod: a dated timeline

Date	What happened
28 August 2018	TypeFox announces the public beta of Gitpod.
Late 2020	Gitpod is spun out of TypeFox as an independent, venture-backed company.
December 2022	Gitpod stops developing the edition customers installed and ran on their own Kubernetes clusters (existing contracts aside) and offers Gitpod Dedicated instead.
October 2024	Gitpod Flex ships, a new architecture Gitpod started building in January 2024.
31 October 2024	Gitpod publishes why it is leaving Kubernetes after six years, at 1.5 million users.
30 April 2025	Gitpod drops the "Flex" name and says gitpod.io, now called Gitpod Classic, will close in September 2025.
2 September 2025	Gitpod renames itself Ona and moves the Classic pay-as-you-go shutdown to 15 October.
15 October 2025	Gitpod Classic pay-as-you-go ends. Enterprise customers are on separate timelines.
11 June 2026	Ona announces an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team.
10 August 2026	The acquisition closes, according to an update on Ona's announcement.
November 2026	Ona's billing docs say new Core subscriptions are no longer available. www.gitpod.io redirects to ona.com.

The sources for each row are in the sections below.

Gitpod Dedicated, Flex and the move off Kubernetes

The first big change was for companies, not individuals. In December 2022, DevClass reported that Gitpod had stopped development and support of the edition companies installed on their own Kubernetes clusters, apart from what was already contractually agreed. Gitpod said it had become "increasingly difficult for us to support" and "a burden for our clients to manage and operate". Its replacement, Gitpod Dedicated, was an isolated single-tenant installation, at first on AWS only, that Gitpod managed for the customer.

Two years later Gitpod rebuilt the product. In We're leaving Kubernetes (31 October 2024), Christian Weichel and Alejandro de Brito Fontes wrote that after six years and 1.5 million users, with thousands of environments a day, Kubernetes was "not the right choice for building development environments". The replacement, Gitpod Flex, started in January 2024 and shipped that October. It split Gitpod into a control plane that Gitpod ran and "runners" that create the environments. According to Gitpod, a company could install Flex on its own infrastructure in under three minutes, and individuals could run environments on a laptop with Gitpod Desktop.

In Naming is hard (30 April 2025), Gitpod dropped the Flex name, because it suggested a pricing tier or a separate product, and called the new architecture simply Gitpod. The same post named the old gitpod.io service Gitpod Classic and said it would close in September 2025. As of November 2026, Ona's docs say runners run on Ona Cloud or on a customer's AWS or GCP account.

Is Gitpod shutting down? What ended on 15 October 2025

The part most individual users knew, gitpod.io on pay-as-you-go billing, is shut down. Ona's notice, Gitpod Classic pay-as-you-go sunset, published on 2 September 2025, said:

• Pay-as-you-go users "will not be able to login or start new environments after October 15th".
• Secrets, projects, configurations and workspace data would not move automatically and had to be migrated by hand. Users were told to push their code and download any workspace content they wanted to keep before the date.
• The .gitpod.yml format was deprecated. Ona environments use devcontainer.json for the environment and an automations.yml file for tasks (Ona's current docs use .ona/config.yaml), and running gitpod env migrate inside an Ona environment helped convert the configuration.
• The timeline didn't apply to Enterprise customers, whose account managers set their own.
• Ona environments would cost "up to 66% less than Gitpod Classic on comparable machines": the post listed Classic's Regular workspace at $0.36 an hour and Ona's Small environment at $0.12.

The gitpod-io/gitpod README now says Classic pay-as-you-go "did sunset on October 15th 2025" and that Ona no longer recommends that version. The company didn't shut down, though. It became Ona, and then part of OpenAI.

Gitpod became Ona, then part of OpenAI

The rename came with a new product. Gitpod is now Ona, by CEO Johannes Landgraf (2 September 2025), describes "re-founding the company as Ona: the mission control for your personal team of software engineering agents". It says that what "began as a one-click online IDE for GitHub" had grown into cloud development environments used by 2 million developers. The environments remained, now as the sandboxes agents work in.

On 11 June 2026, Ona announced in Ona is joining OpenAI that it "has entered into an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team", subject to regulatory approvals, with the two companies staying separate until then. OpenAI published its own announcement, "OpenAI to acquire Ona", the same day. It presented the deal as bringing Ona's cloud execution and orchestration technology into Codex, so agents can keep working beyond one device or session. Ona's post gives no price. An update at the top of it says the transaction closed on 10 August 2026 and that Ona is now part of OpenAI.

As of November 2026, Ona's billing docs say new Core subscriptions are no longer available, existing ones are still supported, and people who are new to Ona should get started with Codex. Ona's docs still cover running environments and the Codex agent for existing Core and Enterprise organisations.

What this means if you used Gitpod

Your old workspaces. If you were on pay-as-you-go, your Classic workspaces were closed on 15 October 2025. The sunset notice describes no way to retrieve workspace data after that date. Anything you pushed to your Git host is safe; anything that only lived in a workspace should be treated as gone. Enterprise customers should ask their account manager.

The .gitpod.yml in your repos. It does no harm, but nothing current reads it: Ona deprecated it, and Codespaces, DevPod and most other tools use devcontainer.json. The fields map across directly:

.gitpod.yml	devcontainer.json
image or image.file	image, or build.dockerfile
tasks[].before and tasks[].init	postCreateCommand
tasks[].command	postAttachCommand (or postStartCommand)
ports[].port	forwardPorts
env	containerEnv or remoteEnv

The example above becomes:

{
  "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/javascript-node:22",
  "postCreateCommand": "npm install",
  "postAttachCommand": "npm run dev",
  "forwardPorts": [3000]
}

"Open in Gitpod" badges. Pay-as-you-go users can no longer log in, so for most visitors the badge leads nowhere useful. Replace it with a badge that works today; adding a live demo to a GitHub README has the Markdown for each option.

Gitpod alternatives by use case

There is no single replacement, because people used Gitpod for different jobs. Prices are as of October and November 2026.

What you used Gitpod for	Use instead	Why
A full editor in the browser for any repo	GitHub Codespaces	codespaces.new/OWNER/REPO is the closest thing to the gitpod.io/# prefix, and it reads devcontainer.json
Company environments on your infrastructure, as Gitpod Dedicated was	Coder	Open source (AGPL-3.0); you define environments as Terraform templates
Gitpod's workflow without a vendor account	DevPod	Open-source client that creates devcontainer.json environments on any backend
Sandboxes for agents through an API, as Ona became	Daytona, or Ona through Codex	Daytona now describes itself as infrastructure for running AI-generated code
Quick frontend prototypes to share	CodeSandbox	Cloud VMs with a browser editor, owned by Together AI since December 2024
Trying a repo or reviewing a pull request from a link	pyrovue	Installs and starts the project with no config and gives you a live preview

GitHub Codespaces is the nearest like-for-like for daily work. A free personal account includes 120 core-hours a month (60 hours on a 2-core machine) and 15GB-month of storage; after that, 2 cores cost $0.18 an hour. It only works with GitHub repositories. Our Codespaces comparison covers where it fits.

Coder suits teams that ran Gitpod Dedicated and want environments on infrastructure they control. The Community edition is free with unlimited users and workspaces; Premium is priced per user and the price isn't published. You write a template for each kind of environment, so expect platform-team work up front.

DevPod, from Loft Labs, is MPL-2.0 licensed and runs environments on your laptop, a Kubernetes cluster, any remote machine or a cloud VM. It has a devpod.sh/open# link much like Gitpod's prefix, but DevPod is client-only, so whoever opens the link needs it installed.

Daytona now sells sandboxes for running AI-generated code, billed per second: $0.0504 per vCPU-hour and $0.0162 per GiB-hour, with $200 of free credit. Choose it if you used Gitpod's or Ona's API to run code for agents.

CodeSandbox fits frontend work you want to share. The free Build plan includes 40 VM-hours a month; see our CodeSandbox comparison.

For background on how all of these work, see what a cloud development environment is.

Moving a .gitpod.yml to pyrovue.json

If you used Gitpod to try projects, review pull requests or run demos rather than as your daily editor, pyrovue does that part. The prefix habit carries over: put pyrovue.com/ in front of a github.com or gitlab.com address, and the project is installed and started in a box with a live preview, a terminal and an editor for the files. A pull request runs from https://pyrovue.com/github.com/OWNER/REPO/pull/NUMBER. It isn't a full IDE, so for all-day work Codespaces or Coder fit better.

pyrovue doesn't read .gitpod.yml, and most repos need no config at all: it reads lockfiles, the README, Dockerfiles, Compose files and devcontainer.json. When you want to be explicit, the same commands go in a pyrovue.json at the repo root:

.gitpod.yml	pyrovue.json
before and init commands, in order	setup
the command that serves the app	start
the port you exposed	port
env	env
a second task, such as a backend	an entry in services

The single-task example becomes:

{
  "setup": ["npm install"],
  "start": "npm run dev",
  "port": 3000
}

A .gitpod.yml with one task for a Python backend and one for a frontend becomes a background service plus the app the preview shows:

{
  "setup": ["cd /workspace/backend && pip install -r requirements.txt", "npm install"],
  "services": [{ "cwd": "backend", "start": "uvicorn main:app --port 8000", "port": 8000 }],
  "cwd": "frontend",
  "start": "npm run dev",
  "port": 5173
}

A custom workspace image has no equivalent. pyrovue picks Node from .nvmrc, .node-version or engines, and Python from .python-version or runtime.txt, so pin versions there. The Gitpod comparison page covers the rest.

Checklist for a repository that still mentions Gitpod

1. Remove the "Open in Gitpod" badge and any gitpod.io/# links from the README and CONTRIBUTING files.
2. Move the .gitpod.yml commands into devcontainer.json, then delete .gitpod.yml and any .gitpod.Dockerfile unless someone still uses an Enterprise Classic installation.
3. If contributors need a browser editor, add an "Open in GitHub Codespaces" badge. If visitors only need to see the project run, add a run badge, and a pull request link if reviewers should see changes running (pull request previews).
4. Copy any secrets you kept in Gitpod's settings into the new tool's secret store. Nothing migrates them for you.