
Ask HN: Legal problems when discontinuing side businesses - tobire
I&#x27;m now at a point in bootstrapping a SaaS idea where I&#x27;m thinking about legal stuff.<p>How would I go about making sure that there is no legal problem when I have to stop the service (for whatever reason) and drop my paying customers?
Is a simple sentence in a Terms of Service page enough and does it depend on my country of residence (I&#x27;m from Germany)?<p>I was thinking about only offering monthly subscriptions, so that nobody would have to pay too far in advance in case I have to quit the business. Is that a good idea?
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h2odragon
Suggestion: instead of covering your ass when you bolt; how about planning for
a more orderly exit and spelling that out in your contract? Without any idea
what service you propose to offer; the way you phrase this question makes me
want to hunt for a different provider of that service immediately.

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mtmail
Most terms-of-service include a phrase the service can cancel for reasonable
(sometimes for any) reason. Paying customers back is the easiest approach. For
a new bootstrapped service that would be manageable (won't bankrupt you). As
you said annual pre-payment is great but best to not spend it all immediately.

Setting up a help page pointing to similar services would be nice. Example
[https://www.mapzen.com/blog/migration/](https://www.mapzen.com/blog/migration/)
And with GDPR in mind a way to export data. Also privacy related make clear
who now controls the existing data (you personally is fine, deleting all is
fine, some users worry it gets sold).

If you registered a company (UG, GmbH) then for tax purposes you might need to
proper shutdown the company. There's processes and form for that and you might
need to submit annual accounts for several years even if both income and
expenses are zero. With German UG you're still personal liable should any
customer demand money, let's say they sue for damaged and however unjustified
you then have legal costs more than the company has on their bank account.
GmbH costs 25000 Euro to setup so I assume with bootstrapping you don't go
that route.

When we were still bootstrapped companies flat out asked us how long we
existed (e.g. 3 months) and what guarantee there is we still exist in 6
months. It's a stigma but people have been burned with startups in the past.

