Sell, open source, or shut down: what to do with your abandoned SaaS
A decision framework for the three real options when you are done with a side project. When to sell, when to open source, when to quietly turn it off.
You have decided you are done. The project sat untouched for months, the guilt is louder than the excitement, and you finally said it out loud: I am not coming back to this.
Good. That is the hard part. Now what?
Most founders get stuck here for another six months. They know it is over, but they cannot decide what over looks like. So the project drifts. The domain auto renews. The Stripe account sits idle. The GitHub repo gathers cobwebs.
There are really only three viable paths once you have called it. I want to walk you through them honestly, because picking the wrong one costs you time and dignity, and picking no path costs you both, plus the project itself.
Option 1: Sell it
This is the right call when four things line up.
First, there is a coherent product. Not a folder of half experiments. A user can sign up, do the thing, and the thing works. Even if “the thing” is small.
Second, the domain works and is not embarrassing. A clean .com or .ai with a name a buyer can actually grow. If your domain is myappv2-final-real.xyz, sell the code without the domain.
Third, you have realistic expectations. We are talking $500 to $10k for most projects on Failedups. Anyone telling you that 8 months of weekend work is worth $50k is either lying or selling a course about it.
Fourth, you want some capital recovery. Even a couple thousand dollars going back into your runway feels meaningfully better than zero.
If those four are true, list it. Failedups is built for exactly this. MicroAcquire is fine if you have actual MRR, but their model assumes the kind of polished metrics you probably do not have. The whole reason Failedups exists is that the unfinished, no-revenue, “I just want this off my plate” tier had nowhere honest to go.
Option 2: Open source it
This is the right call for a different shape of project.
If what you built is closer to a library, a tool, an API wrapper, or a developer utility than a SaaS, the buyer pool on a marketplace is thin. But the contributor pool on GitHub is enormous. A scraper that pulls Notion data into Obsidian. A CLI for managing Stripe test accounts. A weird little Tailwind plugin. Things where the audience is “developers like me” rather than “paying customers.”
Open source is also right when you do not really need the money but you do care about the project surviving. You spent a year on this. You learned things. You wrote code you are proud of. Letting it die feels worse than letting it live in someone else’s hands without you owning it.
There is a portfolio benefit too. A well documented open source project on your GitHub does more for your hireability than the same project hidden in a private repo. Hiring managers look at READMEs.
The cost is mostly the readme itself. Spend an afternoon writing one. Strip out your API keys. Add a license, MIT is fine, do not overthink it. Tweet it once. Done.
Option 3: Shut it down quietly
This is the option founders avoid because it feels like admitting failure. But sometimes it is the only honest move.
Shut down when the project is coupled to your personal accounts. Your OpenAI key. Your Twilio number. Your AWS account with auto-scaling that will quietly bill the new owner $400 in a bad week. Untangling that for a $1k sale is not worth the ongoing support headache.
Shut down when the product is dead-end embarrassing. A clone of something that already won. A pivot you do not believe in. A name that does not survive a sober reread. Selling it makes a buyer waste their weekends. Open sourcing it puts your name on something you no longer endorse. Just turn it off.
Shut down when there are no real users to disappoint. If 4 people signed up and 2 of them are you and your cofounder, nobody is missing this. Email the others, give them 30 days to export anything, cancel the domain renewal, archive the repo.
The trick to shutting down well is doing it cleanly. Send the email. Honor exports. Pay out any subscriptions you owe. Then close it. The internet does not need a tombstone for every project.
The secret fourth option
Failedups also has a cofounder track. You hand the project to someone who actually wants to run it, you keep a small equity tail, and you go back to your day job. The project lives without you owning the operational weight.
This is the right move when the project has more potential than you have appetite. You believe in it. You just do not want to be the one carrying it. Someone else might. We pair these intentionally. It is a real path, and worth knowing about before you default to one of the first three.
Stop optimizing the decision
Here is the honest part. Most founders spend more time deciding what to do with a dead project than they spend deciding what to build next. That is upside down.
Look at the four options. Pick the first one that fits. If two seem to fit, pick the one that closes faster. Selling closes faster than open sourcing in most cases, so when in doubt, list it.
The project has been sitting in your archive folder long enough. It deserves a verdict. Whichever verdict you pick, the next morning you wake up with one less guilty browser tab open, and you can finally start the next thing.
Ready to give it a real ending? List your project on Failedups. Even an honest “here is what I tried, here is what works, here is what does not” listing finds the right home faster than another quiet month in the archive.