Shutting Down Linkpatch Best Blog Ever

Over the last several months, it's become clear that Linkpatch doesn't get much love from our team by way of new features and improvements. We've finally decided to shut it down, effective January 31.

Every customer has been sent an email about our decision and no further charges will be processed for paid accounts. Customers with annual billing will be refunded all remaining months they paid for. If you have any other questions about your account, feel free to email help@linkpatch.com or let us know in the comments.

We came up with the idea for Linkpatch over four years ago. It's been a great tool to help us keep track of broken links and we'll continue using it internally. So why shut it down? 3 reasons:

Lack of passion

Time is finite. It's important to dedicate all your energy to things you are 200% passionate about. Linkpatch has never been that way for us. It's a nice little utility, but it's not something we want to hang our hat on.

18 months after launching the public version of Linkpatch, we haven't added any significant features. We have a list of things we'd love to do, but nothing gets done because we're not passionate about the product like we are our other apps.

In hindsight, Linkpatch would have been best kept as a little PHP script that we use internally or maybe released as an open source project. We didn't have what it took to see the product through in the long term. You can't ever half-ass a web app and expect it to be a success.

Limited Market

Linkpatch is a product for people that build websites. In the grand scheme, it's a small market of potential customers. We'd prefer to focus our energy on building products that can have a larger impact.

Focus

It's hard enough to build a great product without distractions. Linkpatch is a distraction we got excited about, but weren't fully dedicated to. By shutting it down, our focus can be squarely on making Feed My Inbox and Help Scout better products in 2011 and beyond.

It sucks to quit at something, but it's been an invaluable learning experience. We won't make these mistakes again.

We've done some research and came up with the following alternatives to Linkpatch. We have little to no experience using these products, so they are ordered alphabetically: