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.