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@kettlebell_ned ·

$340 mrr and 4.5 hours a month - keep it on life support or turn it off? Zombie Mode

41 paying accounts, $340 MRR, no growth for about a year. Last month I put 4.5 hours into it: two support emails, one database version nag, and one broken CSV import from a customer whose own system exports something that is nearly but not quite a CSV.

After hosting, transactional email, fees and monitoring I clear about $218. That is $48 an hour, except I do not pick the hour. It is a Sunday evening, or a Tuesday when I am at the job that actually pays me.

Do I keep it alive or is this the thing everyone tells you to kill?

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  • @stipend_sam · 3w ago · 2 replies
    @stipend_sam ·

    The hours are not the cost. The interrupt is. Four and a half hours that arrive as five unscheduled fragments cost more than a scheduled day, and that is why this feels heavier than $48 an hour sounds.

    So attack the interrupts, not the total:

    • one support window a week, autoresponder that promises 72 hours and means it
    • delete the CSV import. That one feature is generating the only ticket you cannot answer in two minutes
    • move anything you patch yourself onto something managed, even if it costs $20 more

    If that gets you to an hour a month on a Saturday you choose, $218 is fine money for something you already built. If it does not, you have your answer.

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    • @finops_reyna · 3w ago
      @finops_reyna ·

      Seconding "delete the import". Every one of these products has one feature responsible for most of the support load, it is nearly always an importer or an integration, and removing it churns two customers and buys back half your year.

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  • @hollis_pike · 3w ago
    @hollis_pike ·

    Raise prices before you decide anything. Forty-one accounts on 2021 pricing, put everyone up 40% with 60 days notice. You will probably lose four to six and land around $430.

    The useful part is not the money. It is your own reaction to sending that email. If your gut says "I could not possibly", that is you telling yourself what you think the product is worth, and you should read it as data.

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  • @r2_bucketeer · 3w ago · 2 replies
    @r2_bucketeer ·

    Sell it. $340 MRR with low churn and five years of history lists somewhere around 2.5-3.5x annual profit, so call it $6.5-9k before fees. There are people who run six of these at once and for whom your 4.5 hours is thirty minutes because they already have the runbooks.

    You will not retire on it. You will also never think about the CSV import again.

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    • @nightbus_nina · 3w ago
      @nightbus_nina ·

      Worth setting expectations: buyers want twelve months of clean Stripe records and a repo someone else can deploy, and the transfer itself is two weekends. If your books are tidy this is easy money. If they are not, budget the tidying as part of the price.

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  • @spreadsheet_tabs · 3w ago
    @spreadsheet_tabs ·

    Third option nobody offers: keep it and stop supporting it. Publish a line in the app saying best effort, no SLA, no roadmap. Autoresponder points at the docs. Churn will rise and that is the point - you find out what it is worth without you attached, and you can decide again in six months with real numbers instead of guilt.

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  • @blown_cap · 3w ago · 2 replies
    @blown_cap ·

    $340 a month is $4k a year for basically nothing. Servers do not care. Keep it forever.

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    • @kombucha_kai · 3w ago
      @kombucha_kai ·

      Servers do not, deprecations do. A runtime going out of support, a TLS chain change, a payment API version sunset, a major database upgrade you cannot defer any more. "Forever" costs about a day a year even if literally zero customers email you, and it arrives on a schedule set by other people.

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  • @adjunct_life · 3w ago
    @adjunct_life ·

    I turned mine off at $290 and stopped thinking about it by week two. That is the only data point I have and I would not pretend it transfers.

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