Is there any reason you can't just leave current the product as-is and keep running it on autopilot, with the only expenses being hosting and the occasional security vulnerability mitigations?
You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying users. Could they not keep using the product (especially if they've already onboarded)? Or are there significant ongoing costs beyond hosting?
Products don't run themselves. Software must be upgraded because of security patches; if you don't keep up, after a while you can't because of skew. Customers require support when stuff goes wrong. Infrastructure changes from underneath you. SDKs change all the time. The law itself changes what is allowed or what is required.
Depends on what kind of product. I've built an app that I haven't touched in many years with about $1M in monthly revenue (extremely low margin) and it's all good. Yes, it hasn't had any security patches in years and it's just a matter of time before it gets hacked but no big deal. If shit really hits the fan I will just shut it down. Not offering any support. Customers know I don't add anything. Not sure what law would affect anything.
> I've built an app that I haven't touched in many years with about $1M in monthly revenue (extremely low margin) and it's all good. Yes, it hasn't had any security patches in years
You have a product bringing in $12 million per year (EDIT: I misread the profit remark originally, apologies to Kiro), and you can’t be bothered to do basic security updates?
> it's just a matter of time before it gets hacked but no big deal. If shit really hits the fan I will just shut it down.
You’re basically waiting to get hacked and your response plan is to just shut it down? And turn off $12 million in annual revenue because you didn’t feel like applying security updates?
Are you sure you mean $1 million per month in revenue? Because this doesn’t make any sense at all.
If this is true and accurate, you can at least see why this wouldn't apply to virtually anyone else running a high-profit software app, right? Especially not something like Friday.app which includes customer data.
taking a guess that your app is an API wrapper of some kind? the $ you move is basically through your account from customer to service provider on each call and you charge some low flat rate per month for access?
That really depends on the product and how you built it. With platforms like Google App Engine or Heroku, there's no infrastructure to take care of and the only thing you have to patch/update is your own code. Customer support can be an issue, but some products are naturally self-service. Or cheap enough that there's no expectation of quality support.
I do think you need to plan for this sort of thing if you want to be able to walk away (even for a short vacation). If your natural inclination is to start with k8s, you're going to need ongoing devops work in perpetuity.
> You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying users
Definitely not. A company of that size with 100K paying users (so like $10M+ ARR) would be considered wildly successful. In their case it was probably a tiny tiny fraction of that.
Did you try asking users to pay? I.e. tell your users, you're shutting down unless everyone starts paying. It could be Kickstarter style in that X number of users have to put in their payment information by some date, or you still shut down. That way, there's no chance that some people start paying, but you still shut down.
Great question. I wish Pebble had done this before shutting down. I would have paid double for my pre-ordered Time Steel 2.
Wyze did this recently with their subscription, which they let you pay as little as $0 for. They forced anyone who didn't subscribe onto a lower tier, which only stored still images instead of videos in the cloud.
I believe couple of days ago Wordpress made some changes to their pricing and some people immediately reached for their pitchforks. We all have an inherent tendency to associate greed to any business asking for more or any(!) money.
I believe for that reason, for some founders it is, "you either die a hero or...."
You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying users. Could they not keep using the product (especially if they've already onboarded)? Or are there significant ongoing costs beyond hosting?