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What do with a project that has one user?

3 points by coolsunglasses ↗ HN
I have a small free link-saving service at http://scrooty.com/ that a friend of mine uses. I'd like to kill off the servers as they're the only one that uses it, but that seems rude.

I've showed them other projects but the user professes their love for Scrooty and only Scrooty. (I showed them Delicious, Historious, and like five other things)

User's unwilling to pay for the service, suggested advertising.

Any suggestions as to what I should do with this?

12 comments

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dangoldin
I have a similar project (http://www.twirlapp.com/) that only I and a friend of mine uses. The cost is pretty minimal for me to maintain since it's on a shared instance with a ton of my other projects so I just keep it up.

I do some occasional work when I need a break from everything else and I thought of open sourcing it but never really got around to it.

ebrenes
Just provide your friend with a deadline for when you're shutting down the service along with the list of possible services he can use to replace the existing one.

I would also just provide him with the option of taking over the server account and paying for the monthly maintenance fee himself. Basically: "Here, please have this, I don't want to deal with this anymore."

coolsunglasses
They're not willing to pay anything for it.

Yeah, I know.

Thinking of making the end of the month the cut off.

ebrenes
Right, but just give them that option, just as part of being nice. That way if they ever bitch about it, you can always say: "if it wasn't worth $x for you, it sure as hell ain't worth $x for me!" :p
carlosn
Taking a look at it just because. Don´t mind me.
coolsunglasses
Just be aware that I'm going to either bring on a paywall ($5/month) or shut it down eventually.
carlosn 

  I know. Like I said, just taking a look, trying to understand why your friend wouldn´t want to switch to something else
coolsunglasses
Because they either charged or led to a lack of organization of links.

It baffled me too.

jameswyse
Funny thing is that by making this post you may just end up with even more users.

You could move it to Heroku (or another similar service) who offer a free plan.

coolsunglasses
>Funny thing is that by making this post you may just end up with even more users.

It occurred to me, but then I trusted in my repellent design skills.

>You could move it to Heroku (or another similar service) who offer a free plan.

I have religious objections to Heroku, but I might do it for the sake of my friend.