I definitely sympathize with the story - that just flat out sucks... but... Making a "feature" product is always a bad idea, IMHO, for reasons even beyond the o

I definitely sympathize with the story - that just flat out sucks... but... Making a "feature" product is always a bad idea, IMHO, for reasons even beyond the ones the author points out. You should never build a feature for a product, if history is not a lesson on its own - very few of them make a successful exit. At any point, the company might decide they can do it better than you or it would be cheaper to build the feature than acquire you - or, most importantly, your hacks and external servers might not mesh well with their vision of an integrated platform.