Ask HN: I've decided to shut down my side project! What now?

I don't have any users. A few tried it out but did no continue using it.

Honestly I can keep it running forever since it's running on a dedicated machine that has lots of resources and that I use for other projects as well. So it's not like it's costing me to keep it up. The burden is purely mentally (I just don't want to keep thinking about it anymore...I tried...I failed...right?)

I experimented with pricing a lot. The one you see now is the latest iteration. The idea was you pay 1$ per EC2 instance per month. So kind of like insurance right? The trick is that if you have say 60 instances you're paying 100$ still because the tier allows 100 instances to be monitored. I wanted the expense to be fixed every month because I've gotten feedback from folks that companies don't like variable cost per month for infrastructure...and it's already an issue that AWS is costing them a different amount each month....so it would be a hard sell to get to them to pay me a variable amount as well (small fish and all that).

Initially I didn't have a free tier at all. I only added it later as a desperate attempt to attract users. That's why historically I never gotten around to setting up a register flow without an invite link. :/ I don't know if 50 is the right number for the free tier but it definitely needs to be a larger number since companies/individuals that I target have a larger amount of servers. The ones that only have a handful don't really need this tool at all since they already mostly know all of their servers by name (so to speak). It's the whole "cattle vs pets" discussion. Anyway, that's where the limit to 50 comes from.

Thanks for the link btw. I read a bunch of patio11's posts but I don't think I've read this one.

Thanks. I can't help myself and still feel like there's something there... but I don't know how to work it. I mean if there was nothing there I wouldn't be hearing about new projects doing something similar. The difference is that they seem super complex and do a lot more. The idea behind my project was to be simple and perhaps be able to serve a subset of the market. But perhaps that was a mistake.

I suppose. Given that it checks the AWS/GCP api on a schedule not sure how effective that would be.

Then again, it's not like the hosting is costing that much. Actually I currently run it on a machine with lost of resources that is used for other things as well...so technically I could keep running it forever. That is to say the cost isn't the main driver for shutting it down. It's more a psychological burden at this point where I'm thinking "ok I tried, it didn't work time to move on".