[mseebach]

Maybe the product never fulfilled the promise of being "the other half of web search" (from a TechCrunch mention 3 years ago) and they realised it was never going to. Maybe they found that investors and potential buyers agreed. Maybe, more importantly, they found that customers agreed - we have no idea what their revenue numbers were. Maybe they found a buyer that would take over the project for a small sum, but required the founders/key staff to sign long employment contracts - which, in the face of the above realisation is a pretty unattractive prospect.

Recalling that the product had something going for it, a while ago, pre-pivot, and obviously not enough to make you a customer, is a rather weak foundation of the assertion that it's worth a non-trivial sum.

Keeping the thing running isn't free - there will always be something to attend to, if nothing else, applying security patches to the stack (which requires testing which takes time and effort). If you expect to run with paying customers, there will always be a minimum of customer service required when payments fail or there are chargebacks or whatever. All that for the benefit of not throwing "something" away? FWIW, 30 stacks of $100 bills is $300k - or about two cheap engineer-year salaries including overhead.