[codingdave]

Is there a reasonable migration path to help your customer move to another solution? If so, you could shut it down gracefully without giving pain to your people.

Because unless you just don't care about your customers, thinking about the best answer for them is often a good guide. If you don't want to run it anymore, do you think someone else can just pick it up on the fly? FYI, In my experience, that answer is always "No", because SaaS apps are about knowing the problem space, the customer needs, and the history. Being able to read the code is 5% of the work. So people tend to quickly be willing to try, but then get discouraged when they realize the difficulties and just shut down on the customers anyway.

So I'd recommend that if you don't want to run it, but also don't want to just turn it off, find a small group of people who know your niche/market, and who already run a SaaS, and pass it on to them. Often, competitors will turn into partners in such situations. Sometimes that even works best for everyone - you get to escape, your competitors grow a bit, and the customers are taken care of.

That is a lot of rambling, but the overall point is that there are probably more options out there than just sell/quit/keep going.

[pohwp]

Thank you. I have worked alone for 18 years though it wasn't my desire. It is often hard to find collaborators. I agree as you say, passing it on to someone on the fly would problably be more work. People have thanked me for the software when I have sought no feedback. It obviously have value. I think I will have one more go at getting it up to date and more secure. I have the term micro changes in my head as a way forward. As a young man I created a beast of a thing and now in my 50s I need to tweak and not rewrite :-)