Just because something should have paying customers doesn't necessarily mean that it has paying customers. There are other factors involved.
Better put: are you a paying customer? If not, then most likely other potential customers are unaware.
Better put: are you a paying customer? If not, then most likely other potential customers are unaware.
There is a demand for this type of service. Real-time chat is in extremely high demand still. Chat was the number one requested feature a "build-you-own" social network startup I worked at a handful of years ago even before Facebook added their chat.
Moving our team off of Grove was a bigger pain then dealing with the sporadic mini-outages so we put up with it longer then smaller teams or most companies. We really liked the feature set but just needed the product to be more stable. The writing has been on the wall for a few months as doing a twitter search will show the lack of a response for a few months now.
If they're shutting it down because it isn't sustainable, that's fine, I don't expect them to run the service as a charity (we have freenode for that!) - but that doesn't seem to be the case.