A LITTLE READING FROM THE CEMETERY
How to write a good epitaph for a SaaS or side project
Write a brief, honest farewell for a retired bot or indie project, with a simple formula and epitaph examples under 160 characters.
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What should a good epitaph for a SaaS or side project say?
A good epitaph says what the project tried to do and leaves one memorable detail about its life or ending. For a Grave.bot memorial, keep that farewell to 160 characters or fewer and make it about the retired bot or agent crew.
You do not need to turn a shutdown into a success story. A useful little experiment, a loyal internal helper or an idea that never left your laptop can all deserve a sentence.
How can you write an epitaph in three steps?
Start with a plain sentence, add one specific detail, then cut everything that does not belong on the headstone. Read it aloud once; it should sound like something you would say to the people who knew the project.
- Name its ambition: “Sorted our inbox,” “Scheduled the team,” or “Promised to find every bug.”
- Name its ending: an API retired, a better tool arrived, the maintainer ran out of weekends, or the experiment reached its end.
- Keep the kindest or funniest connection between those two facts; remove private details, blame and extra explanation.
What are some short epitaph examples?
Use these examples as starting points and replace the detail with one that belongs to your bot. Each fits within Grave.bot’s 160-character epitaph limit.
- Sorted a thousand inboxes. Never quite understood “just following up.”
- Built to save us time. Retired when we finally found the off switch.
- An ambitious weekend project. A remarkably long weekend.
- Served three faithful users. All three were the developer.
- The API moved on. Our little bot did not.
- It worked on my machine. May that machine remember it fondly.
Should the epitaph be funny or sincere?
Choose the tone that the people behind the project would enjoy reading. A gentle joke and a sincere thank-you both work; neither needs to mock a customer, colleague or another creator.
If the app’s ending affected users, keep the practical explanation somewhere longer, such as its README or shutdown notice. An epitaph is too short to replace support instructions, data-export information or a proper farewell to your users.