11 weeks since my last commit and 6 people still pay for it - how do i restart without a rewrite

Do not touch the dependencies. That is not maintenance, that is avoidance wearing a high-vis vest. It gives you the feeling of productive work with zero user-visible outcome, and eleven weeks of guilt will happily be spent on a framework upgrade that nobody asked for.

First move: email the six people. One paragraph, no apology, no roadmap. Something like - you have been paying for this for a while, what is the one thing that annoys you about it. You will get two or three replies and one of them will be a fifteen minute fix.

Ship that fix. Now you have a commit, a reason, and a person who noticed. The upgrade can wait until something forces it, and something eventually will, and that is fine because it will have a deadline attached rather than being a way to avoid the product.

Write a file called STATE.md before you write any code. What it does, what is broken, what you were in the middle of, what you decided and why. One page. Then commit it.

The reason you closed the repo is not the dependencies, it is that you no longer have the mental model in your head and rebuilding it feels like more work than starting over. That file is the mental model, and next time you go cold for two months it is a ten minute reload instead of a wall.

Before anything else, spend twenty minutes on the things that fail silently when you are away. Card on file for the hosting, domain renewal, TLS cert renewal if it is not automatic, any API key with an expiry, the cron that runs backups, and whether those backups are actually restorable.

I came back to a project after a similar gap and discovered the nightly backup job had been failing for five weeks because a token rotated. Nothing was broken. Nothing had alerted. There was simply no backup.

That check is not procrastination because it protects the six people who are paying you. Everything after that should be user-visible.

$78 a month from six people who have not complained in eleven weeks is a real signal. It means the thing works and the value is not dependent on you shipping. Most side projects never get there.

Also give yourself permission for the answer to be: keep it running, do two hours a month, do not grow it. That is a legitimate outcome and it is very different from abandoning it. The guilt usually comes from an unexamined assumption that it has to become something.

Momentum on a side project is mostly about the size of the smallest useful unit of work. When mine got cold it was because every remaining task had grown into a three-evening job in my head, and I never have three consecutive free evenings.

So I split the board until nothing on it takes more than an hour. It feels like busywork when you are doing the splitting. It is the entire difference between opening the editor and closing the tab.

The rewrite urge is almost always a request for a smaller problem, not a better codebase. You do not want to rewrite it, you want a task that fits in the ninety minutes you actually have.

So make one. Pick the ugliest screen and fix one thing on it. Not the architecture. One button, one error message, one empty state. Sixty to ninety minutes, done, deployed. Do that three times across two weeks and the project stops being a monument and goes back to being a thing you work on.