My impression is that the main reason of your startup failure is that it ran out of money. It seems you have a valuable product in your hands and a potential fo

My impression is that the main reason of your startup failure is that it ran out of money. It seems you have a valuable product in your hands and a potential for a successful startup, since you had significant user interest when the application was free. If you manage to provide the service and run your startup at the cost of a reasonable fraction of your salary, you would never meet this "end of money" wall and your startup could run forever. So first, check out to cut the costs to a minimum, eventually offering a more modest service, especially if it's free. User will understand this, as they will understand that an extended service would require sharing the costs of hosting. You should then make sure the benefit compensates largely its cost, from the user perspective of course. You wrote that there was no need for such service. How do you know ? The users could come up with a usage, and thus a need, you didn't thought out before. This is what you can gain from offering the service for free. Collect feedback and suggestions, you might find gold gems and perls in it. The freemium model would make sense, if you can keep the cost of free service to a minimum. It is preferable, if you can manage it, to provide the service without depending on fixed amount of investment money that will be running out soon or later. You can achieve this by reducing the cost to a reasonable fraction of your salary. That's the plan for my startup. I will start by hosting the service at home and thus without hosting cost. If there is income, and its progression ensures break even may be reached, then I'll invest in the next step, and so on. The trick is to make an investment only if a positive money flow balance is restored shortly after it, progressing by steps, minimizing the risks of "end of money" failure. With this policy, your startup can only fail because of bad luck, like being hit by lightning for instance.