Notice of Shutdown

I've always wondered why more companies don't do this. I mean sure, if you've got a buyout offer then I can see why you might not want to open source your work, but in the case of a standard shut down, it'd certainly be better to let people get some use out of your work rather than none.

Acquisitions take time. And money. If you're running out of both, the risk of undertaking a long and expensive process, that may result is nothing is risky, and in some cases illegal (taking on debt [legal fees on terms] that you can't reasonably pay = trading while insolvent).

I'm not suggesting at all that in this instance the company was in such a state, but often I've seen founders run it right to the line believing things will turn around, and they don't. At that point, there is no reasonable way to sell the assets or ownership of the company easily.

> I'm sure many people (myself included) would be happy to keep services like this running

Why don't you then? Send an email saying you're willing to donate whatever it costs to keep the servers running.

Yeah. Thought so.

Many of the forms are scraped from EDGAR anyway, so if you really need a standard contract you can usually find an exemplar. Typical startup docs can be had from Series Seed, NVCA, Clerky or one of the many marketing sites like cooleygo. I wish there was a more focused and well-funded effort by the big firms to agree on standard forms, and to annotate them. But people who have tried can tell you it is a Sisyphean task to actually make this happen.

The Free Law Project (https://free.law/) is the only thing remotely similar I can think of.

They’re shutting down, because not enough people are using them. Not sure if that means the void is unnoticeable.

I've only learned about docracy from this post (which is a shame) but I've used https://dochub.com/ in the past and it works really well.

Not having used docracy I'm not sure if there's feature parity but it at least seems similar (e.g. editing & signing PDFs/documents)

edit: I see that one of the (if not _the_) feature of docracy was the shared library of documents/templates. That's something Dochub doesn't have I think.

Spent a number of hours researching this yesterday and settled on http://www.concordnow.com/

While I understand your frustration, shutting down a service — especially if you have no money to spend a lot of time on the shutdown — is always hard. It looks like these folks have provided an export option and a reasonable shutdown window, which is worth commending.

If only it were as easy as that.

Open sourcing it might be the most straight forward option, but there could be complicated intellectual property issues behind the scenes that make that prohibitively difficult, or expensive.

A paid option? Isn't that what every single commercial business attempts to do? The option of using a product or service in exchange for paying money. The failure rate for businesses is huge. What makes you think a paid option would actually work? It isn't a sure thing, nor are donate buttons, and in the time you need to take to test pricing models, tweak copy, increase conversion etc, you continue to lose money each month, and have no guarantee of success.

I think you drastically underestimate the effort involved in "post a paypay link or a bitcoin link".

What about the cost of compliance? The cost of accounting? Customer service? Cost of mitigating risk? There are a heap of costs to running a business. How do you know if the donations you (probably won't) get will cover them? Then what? You've lost more money.

At some point you just have to call it a day.

This comment provides a different perspective:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16478166

I am planning on doing a site rip for my personal reference, in case I need to leverage any of these documents in the future. I've never used the site before but it seems like a nice resource that I would like to have.

If I do the site rip are you interested in obtaining a copy?

EDIT - in case it wasn't obvious, I am only interested in and referring to the publicly available documents aspect of Docracy, which is what I assumed you were talking about. But I realize you may be using their other, private features like holding private contracts and digitally signed documents. If you are interesting in my pending rip of the freely available documents, let me know.