> "Our CRM vendor announced sunset last month — twelve years of customer history and we have ninety days to figure out what to keep."
^pain
A collective survivability pain. A SaaS service deprecates a feature, gets acquired, or shuts down entirely. The institutional knowledge accumulated inside has to be exfiltrated through whatever export the vendor provides — usually incomplete. Survivors become defensively redundant, but the next vendor presents the same risk.
## Discovery questions
- "If a critical SaaS vendor sunset tomorrow, what institutional knowledge would go with them?"
- "Of the tools your team relies on today, which would survive the vendor going away?"
^discovery-questions
## Examples
- Salesforce announced the shutdown of Heroku's free dyno and database tiers, forcing countless small apps and internal tools offline or into rushed migrations.[^1]
- Atlassian announced Server product end-of-life, pushing Confluence/Jira Server customers to Cloud/Data Center and forcing large-scale knowledge migrations.[^2]
- Atlassian deprecated original Slack-Atlassian integrations and later limited some Slack APIs, forcing teams to rewire automation and knowledge flows.[^3]
[^1]: https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter
[^2]: https://www.atlassian.com/migration/assess/journey-to-cloud
[^3]: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Slack-and-Atlassian-Cloud-Integrations/ba-p/1040716