Let me add:

"Because of that we're joining $totally_unrelated_product. And damaging the ecosystem that allowed us to get to this point."

It bears repeating that every time one of the acquire shutdowns occurs it makes users that much less willing to take a chance on a small startup. Even a shutdown like this that isn't screwing over existing users reminds everyone of the pattern.

Hmmm, maybe I should start ending this, or every message, with "Sarbox delenda est".

(Sarbox must be destroyed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est) ; more specifically, this last nail and quite a few others need to be removed for the casket that the normal IPO was interred into.)

Let me fix the previous sentence:

We started $service pretending to care about solving problem that matters to you so that we could extract from you as much money as possible quickly.

I don't believe what startups say anymore. They don't want to solve anything. They want to make something that looks like a solution for long enough that they get piles of money.

Maybe it's understandable, but I'd like they'd be more up-front about this.

"They don't want to solve anything. They want to make something that looks like a solution for long enough that they get piles of money."

But if they don't offer value to their customers, how are they going to "get piles of money" in the first place?

Most likely they would have gone out of business either way because nobody is going to do an acqui-hire deal if their company had plenty of funding or was actually profitable. If I was working somewhere, I'd rather the founders managed to finagle an acqui-hire rather fire everybody.

You're right, though, there's nothing great about it for the users.

Not necessarily.

They could have been not profitable enough, for themselves or their investors, especially if they got a rich enough acqui-hire offer. Or however profitable their efforts, if they couldn't raise enough money to properly peruse them. They could be facing more work of a type they don't like or weren't good enough at (including hiring the necessary talent), e.g. marketing and sales, and preferred the maximum pivot possible.

Well, those are all just variations of either not being a successful, profitable company or the founders simply not caring anymore. The end result would still likely be the same for the users.

You can still make an exit and be graceful about it. Clearly in their message they mention that user's trust was important to them. I believe that in that case the best reward is to be honest with them.

If I was an entrepreneur I would be rather annoyed by that kind of message because user's trust is a shared resource. It's selfish. Soon enough start-up will start to be negatively connoted. A sort of Made-in-China in the virtual world.