Well, you could try to sell it off before that happens. This genuinely seems better for everyone, even if the buyer has to turn around and start charging or putting ads up or whatever, the users get a better experience than an unannounced switch-off. You don’t have to lie about the numbers or try to get a three comma buy out, and you’ll still get some amount of money for your time.
I just googled “sell my side project” and found a few marketplaces for that sort of thing. Might be worth checking out.
It's better for the users for sure, but they're not owed anything for a free service. For the owner of the service, surely it just serves to add more complexity?
For reference, this is roughly what I have... still not looking to sell today (that also takes time and brain cycles) but this is what I wrote in an email to someone enquiring by email after I posted this morning:
So I wasn't looking to sell when I wrote the comment on HN, but the gist is: 8 years ago I created a platform for forums, it's a PostgreSQL database with a Go API layer. It's multi-tenant by default, so hosting many forums on a single server or cluster is trivial. That much is solid, and well maintained. But... I am not a front-end person and with that in mind I had the frontend built in Python + Django originally... it has no database, it's a pure veneer over the API just to use common templating for making the HTML. This part has not been maintained... it's 8 years out of date, Python 2.
The platform I run has a number of sites on it, and I'm loosely aware that over the years other people had spun up instances of their own.
The entire thing is secure, privacy focused, very low effort to run. There are no adverts, no tracking, no stats... but web logs say that I served 1.5M HTTP requests in the last 24 hours (to now) and that's behind a well configured Cloudflare cache (those not signed in hit cache for 5 minutes, only those signed in get dynamic HTML).
So that's what I have... a forum platform. Oh... what differentiates this forum platform? It has events... in fact the platform is bespoke, the idea when I started it was to have things like classifieds, events, polls, forms, wiki all be native top-level content within a forum. I never liked on vBulletin or Reddit how you'd have to leave the forum to collaborate beyond conversations so I was trying to bring it all into the forum (and thus compete with MeetUp, eBay, etc... who don't have communities and wish they did). Imagine Reddit, but with stronger sense of identity for subreddits, and richer content, and each subreddit able to be on it's own domain if they wished... that's this.
I still don't know if I'm necessarily looking to sell... but if we get to the point that the frontend server fails in some horrible way, the Python + Django being 8 years old probably means the effort to get it working is too much. I did realise this, and started a frontend in Go to replace the Django one (I can maintain Go code) https://github.com/buro9/microcosm but you can see the lack of progress... I joined fast growing startups and my career accelerated too, that doesn't leave time for side projects.
You might try selling on MicroAcquire or Flippa (I haven't used either).
Selling any business will usually take a couple months at least, so waiting until things are on fire and super stressful might not be the best strategy. Listing shouldn't take more than a couple afternoons.
That's a really cool project. The frontend code is very easy to follow, although I looked and looked to see where the API was implemented before figuring out that what the readme describes is not actually in that repo (API server isn't published, right?). :D
It was published. I removed it recently as I was about to butcher it into the other repo with the front-end and didn't want two wildly different versions.
As I haven't done that yet I can put it back up once I get back to a city (currently almost off grid in the Lake District - purposefully didn't bring a laptop with me, I can get away with this as my sites haven't been down in 8 years and I don't feel an obligation to interrupt a vacation to get it online if it did go down during a holiday... It would wait a couple of days).
I just googled “sell my side project” and found a few marketplaces for that sort of thing. Might be worth checking out.