Ask HN: No time to maintain our project, what do to?

We are 3, and “MySeeen” is our first project and startup. We have built it from nothing since 2 years, but with a goal: Making an app you just have to open to get a movie you will have fun watching.

It could be achieved easily by making a social app allowing you to get movies information (length, casting, posters, …), to share about the movies you have seen or want to see and rate them to finally correctly advice a movie for anyone.

MySeeen is available on iOS and Windows Phone. (Info here: http://www.myseeenapp.com)

Unfortunately, after 1 great year in the company, as full time job, without knowing how to earn money and how to enhance our baby, we needed money and slowly stopped maintaining our project. Now we haven’t touched the code for 1 year because we all have started a new life and don’t have the time to maintain it.

We have a good amount of users, and it still growing daily by a good number of people. We don’t want to turn our back to our users, so we have decided to maintain (up and running) the back-end as long as we can, but we need to shut down the company because we still have fees to pay (bank, government, etc…). We post here to get people’s advices, potential users, current or former start-up fans, coders, CEO’s, what would you do if you were us?

Open-source it and let the community maintain it?

Put it on https://flippa.com/

You can get some decent money if you have significant reach—how many MAUs/DAUs do you have?

Thanks, we'll look into it!

I agree, in part: if putting advertisements on your app doesn't help (raise enough money) and selling doesn't work/attempting to sell proves unfruitful, open-sourcing is certainly better than just shutting down. Might as well let people have it, if they're unwilling to pay for it, and the work of actually developing the app is already done. Simply shutting down without open-sourcing means that that work was wasted, whereas open-sourcing it might mean that it remains useful to the user community.