You are not obligated to run the service (whatever it may be). Run it because you want to, run it because you are exploring cool ideas. Work through the though spots because it is worth it and you are happy afterwards.

But when it causes you prolonged stress, or you just don't have the time anymore you are free to shot it down. You can do that now, at x months in the future, or randomly when your servers die. I think your users would prefer that you give them an x months heads up even if they would technically get longer service waiting for your servers to die.

You don't have to sacrifice yourself for people you have never met and who have done nothing for you.

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 it's 8 years out of date, Python 2.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.

Examples of sites using it:

* https://www.lfgss.com (the biggest site on it)

* https://pignolefixe.microco.sm/ (a french site)

* https://forum.espruino.com (something to do with arduino and javascript)

* https://forum.islington.cc (a pretty strong site)

* https://forum.rapha.cc/ (a private members club)

A common theme is cycling.

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.

Do you know about Microns?(https://microns.io)

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).

Ditto - I'm at the point where I either need to get my mind back into the space to (basically) rewrite an entire site (it seems), or let it die. I like it, but hosting it is doing nothing but cost me money right now.

Hard choices, but it was nice to do.

I don’t know what your service is but that’s enough traffic that you likely find a willing buyer?

I recently discovered that there is a pretty active market in people buying/selling smaller businesses and websites like this.

Whether you like what the buyer does with it is a different issue…

True regarding the active market, but generally speaking for your offering to be attractive to that market it has to be already successfully generating income above its costs. There is far less of a market for loss-leaders.

(The exception to that, by the way, is that if anyone here ever builds anything so useful to a particular company that their sales engineers or developer evangelists are routinely using it or writing blog posts about how to use it you should absolutely get in touch with them and ask them to buy it.)

Another option would be to just communicate the limits of their commitment to the site to their users. Maybe people would step up to takeover/assist, or another solution would be found. At least users would know that it's on the way out in advance.

>250k monthly users, but all the time and a lot of the costs are borne by me and where I'm at now I don't have the time

are you not able to let any of these people know they need to pay or the service will go away soon? I mean 250K 1 dollar a month?

It's not trivial for a side-project to start accept payments. You may need to register a company, open bank account, find and set up a payment processor, publish a privacy policy, hire an accountant to handle tax reporting, write code, etc. All doable, but not a "let's push this lever and see if money starts flowing" type of deal.

And it's not a sure thing the money will start to flow. It will definitely not be 250K 1 dollar a month. 99% of users will just go "fine, I'll switch to one of the other 9 still free alternatives".

Can you not just send e-mail with your IBAN asking for donations?

If its so much money that it seriously impacts your taxes that seems like a great thing. At least that wouldn't be a big deal unless you get some serious cash.

If you have the email of 250k users who all don't want to deal switching service. I can imagine getting a fair amount with a once a year ask for donations. Like more then making it a paid service, people usually are happy to give some money for things they use for free if its useful.

The op literally said "(the money I could afford, but it's the time that is more valuable)".

Stripe can take care of most of the hassle. I’d at least send a “Save the service” email with a Stripe payment link (no programming required) and see if I can get some decent bites.

Stripe basically deals with the easiest parts (the technical) and leaves the hardest (or rather, the most energy draining) part for you as a customer/business owner (the bureaucracy of having a business in your country of choice). If you start accepting money, you need to pay taxes, no way around that.

Initially he could declare this as personal income, just like people who accept donations on open source projects. Once he gets many subscriptions, he can start looking at setting up a company.

Leaving aside whether you're likely to bring in any material amount of money, the logistics involved aren't that hard. You set up whatever payment processor you want, track whatever money comes in (paid to a doing business as entity if you like or just you personally), track business expenses (including computers etc. somewhat related to your business), and file any net income as part of your taxes.

Not necessarily. You can incorporate in a country like Estônia, for example.

One-stop-shop accountants will charge you 50-100 euros/mo and take care of everything.

They don't tax revenue, just distributed profits. As long as you keep the money in the business (even investing) or take a salary, you won't pay taxes in Estonia (assuming you don't live there).

> Not necessarily. You can incorporate in a country like Estonia, for example.

But not with Stripe, which always gives you a Delaware C corp as far as I understand. And if there's a Stripe equivalent from Estonia I have yet to find it, despite all the promotion their government does around "e-residency".

Edit: oh nevermind https://support.stripe.com/questions/supporting-companies-th...

(anyhow, Estonia borders Russia, invest at your own peril)

> And if there's a Stripe equivalent from Estonia I have yet to find it, despite all the promotion their government does around "e-residency".

That would be Xolo.io - but you really don't need a Stripe equivalent in Estonia or most places to incorporate. Registering a company is not that hard most places. I wouldn't recommend Estonia because you still need to open a business bank account for your new entity, that's the hard part.

You don't need a C corp for a project like OP. He would want a bog standard LLC which is fiscally transparent for U.S. tax purposes. It gets more conveluted if he himself is not from the US as it would be treated differently by different countries.

But it isn't hard, it is just boring to get going.

I've been to Estonia twice. It's a great country with great people. I can assure you 99.8% of Estonians have negative interest in having ties to Putin's Russia. Putin is a thug - pardon the harsh opinion -, he wants to loot Ukraine riches. Estonia is a member of NATO and offers nothing for looting, as they have close to zero natural resources.

basically if you start it up now with an email - service going away unless getting paid 1 per month, or one per 3 months even depending on how people feel it worth their time, figure out if it will be worth it, set up stripe, and then you have about a year to do accountant setup business.

I mean I am in Denmark and it isn't that difficult, and believe me Denmark is more difficult and entrepreneur unfriendly than most Western countries.

I wonder how it would fare if a service followed the Amazon wishlist kind of deal, and have random unrelated users directly pay some amount to the service provider, bypassing the site owner.

For instance Linode would expose 30 purchasable items for a site, and each item purchased by a user would pay for 1 day of uptime. As a tradeoff, money going to the project maintainer would need to go through Patreon if they set one up.

> You many need to register a company

Shouldn't you do that anyway to protect yourself?

Hmmm.. Is there a market for that?

> Hmmm.. Is there a market for that?

I don't think it's as bad as the parent comment makes it out to be to accept payments.

You don't need to register a company, you can act as a sole proprietor. This requires no paper work, fees or filing anything. You would need a bank account but most folks already have one, your personal checking account would work. You can grab and tweak a pre-made privacy policy in less than an hour if you decide to include one.

I'm also pretty sure (I'm not an accountant) the first year you're self employed you won't get penalized for not paying quarterly taxes. Of course you need to still pay taxes in April, but you can deal with that then. Even if that wasn't true, the worst case scenario is you pay a fee for not filing every quarter. If you accepted payments and were making tons of money hiring an accountant wouldn't be an issue and if you were making close to nothing then you wouldn't have any fees since you have to be taxed $1,000 in the year to be on the hook for paying estimated taxes per quarter.

The last point of writing code stands true tho. You would need to implement some type of payment accepting feature into your app. Fortunately accepting monthly or annual payments is fairly generic. Once you've implemented this in any app you can mostly drop it into another app without a huge amount of effort. It would mainly come down to little tweaks and making the UI match your app.

> I'm also pretty sure (I'm not an accountant) the first year you're self employed you won't get penalized for not paying quarterly taxes.

I'm only chiming in here since I've become somewhat of a reluctant expert on estimated taxes over the years (assuming we're talking about the U.S. here; apologies to those outside the U.S.). And it happens to be fresh on my mind, since I tackled my Q1 taxes yesterday. ;) I've never heard anything about an exception for one's first self-employed year, so be careful with this. (But hey, the tax code is huge and complex, so I may just not know about it.) Although if you also have withholding from a W-2 job, it may cover you.

Generally, everyone is supposed to pay a certain amount of estimated taxes throughout the year, self-employed or not. But for most people this will happen automatically through W-2 withholding. I suppose it could be a rational move to not worry about estimated taxes the first year, focus on your business instead, and eat any penalties/interest. (You wouldn't be the first to do this.) Or you could just make a guess on what you might owe, and send some money in advance of each estimated tax deadline. If you underestimate, I suppose the penalties/interest would be a lot less than if you avoided it altogether. If you overestimate, you get a refund (or if you choose, a carry-forward to the following year).

Or you can do what I did 15 years ago, and spend a weekend studying IRS documents to understand how it all works, set up spreadsheets to calculate estimated taxes using the annualized method, and perform some minimal maintenance on it each year thereafter.

Don‘t forget that hn has international users. The rules you describe don‘t have to be the same for everyone. And there are a lot of countries with much bureaucracy.

not everyone will pay, but even if 1% pay that's 2.5k$ a month and maybe enough to make it worth it

Careful, this sounds like the 1% fallacy - just because 1% sounds like a small number doesn't make it an easy target.

http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/03/11/the-1-percent-falla...

Obviously building a service and thinking you will get 1% of users to support it may be prone to this fallacy and thus a service should not necessarily be built on this assumption, but in this case they have already sunk the costs of building the service, now it's sending the email to find out if 1% will support it.

I don't think there is a lot of reason to be careful in this case.

This is a very clearly written article. Business focused without the bs lingo. I like that kind of thing, because it gets me thinking about stuff instead of feeling stupid when stepping outside of my expertise.

That article isn't applicable, as it's discussing 1% of a total market, whereas the discussion at hand is about 1% of the site's current userbase.

It's still relevant. There are still numbers lower than 1%. Less than 1% of viewers will upvote/downvote a video they watched, which is much easier (and less expensive) than paying.

No, it's not relevant, because they are discussing completely different conversion metrics and at different scales. Also, your insistence that less than 1% of viewers will interact is based on the mistaken assumption that 100% of reported views represent someone who actually watched. Real life doesn't work like analytics.

About 1% of the people shown an ad (or any content) will even consciously acknowledge it, while approximately 1-3% of the remaining 1% will interact with it, and then 1-5% of that remaining group will actually buy the product. The 99% who didn't acknowledge its existence in the first place don't actually factor into anything other than how much you get charged for the ad.

The difference between the article and the OP's scenario, is that the OP already filtered the 99% and converted the rest. Now there is only one conversion left, which is to make them into paying customers, which is a much higher rate than 1% when you already have a captive audience.

I assume you’re talking forum spam service? Had a look at your website bookmarks so sorry if I made the wrong link/conclusion. Why not use a freemium model?