> We’ve put next to no effort into it over the last year…
You get points for honesty, sir, but this is akin to saying "Screw you, our dear 170 miserable paying customers. We have done nothing to make your money worth it, thanks for being suckers for our brand anyway. Oh, and I feel no shame admitting this publicly!"
How would you feel if you were (or are) one of the 170? Are they getting their money's worth?
If the site works and is providing those 170 people what they want then what exactly is wrong with that? If its not providing them what they want why are they still paying $99 per month for it?
I bet that one single "update your billing information" email detailing what the $99 was for, followed by culling everyone who hadn't updated their information within 30 days would result in an 80%+ drop-off in the revenue of Sortfolio. Not even disclosure that the service was for sale and hadn't been updated in a year - simply a "hey, you're paying $99/mo for Sortfolio. Please click here to confirm you want to continue doing so."
37signals are running the same scam as AOL dial-up here - they're relying on people who have forgotten to hit an "unsubscribe" button rather than providing real value. Personally, I had a lot of respect for 37signals going into this blog post, but I think that's pretty darn slimy.
1. Ultimately, the buyer has every opportunity to cancel the service. I strongly doubt 37signals are going out of their way to make it difficult, as other companies have.
2. If it does what it's meant to do, why would they need to continually update and improve the site?
3. I agree that with a reminder, people may unsubscribe, but it's definitely also possible that people see $99/mo worth of value in their listing. The links are not nofollowed, so the backlink would be worth something. Also, getting a single decent project referral ($10-20k) each year could justify a listing.