We killed a feature after 14 months.

We built a collaborative annotation feature in January of last year. It took 6 weeks to build and shipped in March. We deprecated it this May. Here is the full lifecycle:

• Build time: 6 weeks (2 engineers, roughly $19,000 in salary)

• Maintenance: 14 months of bug fixes, roughly 4 hours per month

• Adoption: peaked at 340 monthly active users in month 4, declined to 88 by month 12

• Revenue attributable: $0. We could never tie a single upgrade or retention to it.

• Support tickets mentioning it: 61 over 14 months, mostly "how do I turn this off"

• Users who complained when we announced deprecation: 3

• Users who churned because of deprecation: 1

The feature never had a clear owner. It was built because a loud user asked for it in month 2. That user left in month 5.

We ran a 30-day sunset with data export. Total cost of the whole experiment, all in: roughly $23,000 and 14 months of a feature slot that could have been something else.

What feature have you built for one loud user who then disappeared?