I'm usually pretty quick to dismiss such claims as well but in this instance I agree with GP jlokier. I do these kinds of massive emergency cost reductions fairly often with my clients and there's always a story of the current maintainers either missing some critical knowledge about what they're currently using / could use instead; or simply massive tunnelvision.

Some key factors here:

- Discontinuing expensive parts of the product is better than discontinuing the entire product.

- I see the M word being thrown around and that… uh… potentially says something.

- "We're not open sourcing because the product is too complicated" is also extremely telling.

- VERY often, "I'll discontinue because I can't afford to run it anymore" hides an underlying "I don't want to run it anymore"; one the maintainer sometimes doesn't fully realize themselves. I've seen this a lot on GDPR day, people shutting off services because it's "too expensive to comply". Talked to a bunch of them, and after a lot of chatting it always boils down to "This will give me a much needed break from the stress of running this thing which doesn't pay my rent, and I get to dodge the blame".

I'm going to go ahead and extend the offer GP can't make. soup.io maintainers, if you're reading this, are indeed spending 10k+ EUR on infra, and do want to keep your service alive and running, please reach out, I'll work pro bono. I also have some good contacts in the archiving world if it comes to that.