Ledger [1] is a tool that reminds you via slack to terminate your EC2 instances (works with GCP as well).<p>I've built this last year. It didn't get any traction and I've recently decided to shut it down. I wrote a twitter thread [2] about it explaining why and listed some of the mistakes I made. And boy there were plenty (some of them I didn't even mention...like how the name is totally wrong XD).<p>I got a suggestion in the twitter thread that I should post it here and see if I can get any more feedback. Might as well get some more knowledge out of this failure, right?<p>It was also suggested by a couple of folks that I list the project on sites like microaquire and indiemaker but I don't know how realistic this is?! I mean why would anyone want to to buy a SaaS with zero users?!<p>[1]: https://ledger.initeq.net/<p>[2]: https://twitter.com/denibertovic/status/1466408868276314114
Do you have any current customer? Can you just unplug it without hurting anyone?<p>The price structure is strange. I think 50 VM in the free plan is too much, and $1200 in the next plan is too much. [This is extremely far from my knowledge area, so perhaps my opinion is very wrong.]<p>Also, from this post by patio11, <a href="https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_software_business" rel="nofollow">https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...</a> the sell price is the annual profit multiplied by a small number, like x1, x2, x3, ... It depends on a lot of things, and people have sold companies without profit, but don't be too optimistic.
I have seen SAAS's on microaquire listed with no customers. In fact I've seen them listed with no customers and no product! Who knows if those sell though.<p>Worth at least investigating.<p>Another option would be to pivot what you've built. So you have the stuff for slack and aws wired up. Forgotten ec2 instance sounds like something people would care about but based on your results maybe not as much as thought?<p>I wonder if there is something else in AWS you could alert via slack that people would care more about.<p>Expiring domains or ssl certs maybe? Though I'm not sure people care much about that either.<p>In any case, neat idea. I bet this experience will pay off big later in weird ways.
My suggestion is to change the pricing to pay as you go. There is no commitment from customers, whatever they save you get some percentage of it. Say you turned off 50 unused machines than you take percentage of 50x1hr of pricing(for demonstration only you choose what you want to charge).<p>1. This will show clear value of your service as you are charging tiny percentage of what you saved.<p>2. Customers would be able to try without any upfront costs/commitment so it would be easier to sell.
Apparently the links are clickable only in comments:<p>[1]: <a href="https://ledger.initeq.net/" rel="nofollow">https://ledger.initeq.net/</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://twitter.com/denibertovic/status/1466408868276314114" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/denibertovic/status/1466408868276314114</a>
I think you should persist with it.
Corporates still struggle with this problem.
Twitter is you friend for this. Connect with VPs in charge of cloud infra of companies with relatively high number of employees and that lean towards tech.
Is it possible to refactor it to use AWS Lambda so it's only using the compute power it needs, rather than maintaining infra? Aka, "serverless"