Use case · SaaS publisher

The SaaS publisher that shuts its platform down

Four years of code, two thousand accounts, seventy former employees. Six months to shut the platform down properly — without leaving users in the dark, without residual GDPR risk, without losing the assets that still hold value.

The setting

You raised your Series A four years ago. You hired seventy people, signed two thousand paying accounts, weathered two pivots and one collective layoff. The market hardened, growth stalled, the board made the call: the platform shuts down at the end of next month; the domain will be left to expire six months later.

What occupies your mornings is no longer the roadmap. It is the legal, fiscal and human questions that pile up. What happens to the source code? Should every client export be delivered? What about contracts with customers in mid-year? Should the marketing site stay online — and if so, who pays for it? What do you do with contact@, sales@, support@ mailboxes that will keep receiving correspondence six months, a year, three years after the shutdown?

You know what to do with the technical debt. You know less what to do with the memorial debt: the body of digital assets your company produced, no longer in operational use but still legally and morally binding — toward customers, regulators, former employees, and your own history.

You don't need a backup. You need an enforceable memory, a transmission framework, and a third party who carries the handover.
  • 4 years of activity
  • 2,000 accounts to inform
  • 70 employees to archive
  • 6 months operational window

What is at stake

  • The source code. Your principal intangible asset. Without a written transfer, it falls into a legally murky zone after registry removal: res nullius, neither protected nor freely exploitable, nor transmissible.
  • Customer exports. GDPR mandates data portability (art. 20) and erasure at contract end. Without a framework, those obligations transfer to former directors personally — see GDPR after cessation.
  • The marketing site. Four years of SEO, hundreds of inbound links, an editorial blog sometimes more visited than the platform itself. Its disappearance cuts former customers off from any reference information: where to export, who to contact, how to retrieve their invoice.
  • The mailboxes. contact@, support@, accounting@ will keep receiving correspondence — court summonses, residual invoices, administrative requests — for years. Without email continuity, those messages bounce silently.
  • The databases. Analytics, CRM, accounting, application logs. Each subject to distinct statutory retention periods — 10 years for accounting (French Commercial Code art. L. 123-22), 5 years for payroll, 3 years for prospecting — that you cannot just wipe in one go.

How Archivum operates

  1. 1

    Scoping the case

    Before any deposit, we map the context: deadlines, stakeholders (shareholders, board, departing employees, possible court-appointed administrators), perimeter of assets, contractual constraints toward in-flight customers, and sector-specific legal obligations. Outputs: a detailed quote, then a template contract adapted to the SaaS publisher case.

  2. 2

    Extraction and deposit

    We coordinate with your engineering team the extraction of Git repositories (all branches, not just production), databases (dated snapshots, schemas, fixtures), internal documentation, customer and vendor contracts. Everything is encrypted, indexed, and stored on sovereign French infrastructure.

  3. 3

    Marketing site frozen as static

    Your marketing site — pages, blog, user documentation — is regenerated as static HTML and migrated to Scaleway behind Cloudflare. The domain is kept. Former customers continue to find the pages they are used to: documentation, FAQ, terms of service, links to exports. See site continuity.

  4. 4

    Email taken over inbound-only

    Critical mailboxes are taken over in inbound-only mode. No outgoing message is possible — protection of former directors against address impersonation. Incoming mail is preserved and accessible to authorised parties.

  5. 5

    Contractual conservation

    The contract sets the archive duration per asset class (5 years for prospecting data, 10 years for accounting, 15 years for source code if a future transfer is contemplated), the people authorised to request access, and the voting rule if several decision-makers are named.

  6. 6

    End-of-period arbitration

    Three months before each deadline, the named decision-makers are notified. They decide collegially between extension, deletion and transfer. Failing a decision, the default scenario provided in the contract applies — see end-of-period arbitration.

Five years on

At the end of the first conservation period, the successors named in the contract decide. Those people may differ from the initial founders — spouses, heirs, partial-buyer former partners, court-appointed administrators.

Extension

A new period, same signatories or new decision-makers. Legal obligations (accounting, GDPR) are restated. Pricing identical on a per-volume basis.

Deletion

Secure destruction of the archive. A certificate is issued to the signatories; it attests to the end of GDPR-bound processing.

Transfer to the trustee

Archivum inherits contractually the rights to all or part of the residual assets (domain, code, content). Terms set in the individual contract.

How much it costs

For a case like the one above — four years of activity, ~500 GB of archives, a 200-page marketing site, five mailboxes — over a five-year conservation period, the order of magnitude is a few thousand euros per year, with volume tiers. The final price is set in a quote after scoping. An estimator will soon let you simulate with your real figures.

Scope your case

If your situation looks like the one above, the most efficient path is to talk for an hour. We understand your context, we validate a perimeter, you walk away with a scoped quote.

Book a scoping call See other cases