[hibikir]

No growing company has a feature-complete product, as just load increases can make a product go from fine to inoperable. Sometimes it's not even more users, but more historical data: Something that used ot parse through 3 months of history is probably going to be unhappy with 5 years.

In big tech, having services without anyone having a semblance of maintenance responsibilities tends to lead to relatively quick failures. Even in boring enterprise companies, handing out maintenance to a 3rd party is still going to cost you, and is likely going to lower quality. I've seen way too many companies that ended up rewriting things after leaving a system mostly unmaintained for 5 years made it sop being fit to purpose.

If there's a lesson of software from the last decade is that undermaintained services become zombified software, and can eat your company's brains. That's why a place like google often would rather shut something down than claim it's finished.