End-of-life notice template, plus the records plan to run before shutdown

What should an end-of-life notice say, and what should happen to the records behind it?

An end-of-life (EOL) notice tells customers which product or version stops being sold, supported or hosted, on what dates, and what they should do next. The notice is the external half of the job. The internal half is a records plan: before the product's systems are switched off, someone decides what happens to its tickets, usage history, release records and customer correspondence.

This page gives you both. The templates below are plain-language starting points for customer notices. The records plan beside them keeps the product's history from disappearing with the infrastructure. This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Check your customer contracts and your own counsel for notice periods and refund terms.

When to use these templates

Use them when a product, plan, API version or hosted service is being retired and customers need dated, specific instructions. They fit a software version sunset, a hardware line discontinuation, a managed service wind-down and a plan consolidation.

Do not use them for a company-wide closure. That needs counsel, employee and creditor notices, and a different sequence; see how to wind down a company without losing its records.

Template 1: the customer announcement

Send this first, to the account owner and the technical contact on each affected account.

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Template 2: the reminder at the halfway point

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Template 3: the final notice

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How to personalize the notice

Follow-up timing

Sequence matters more than wording. A workable rhythm, adjusted to your contracts:

1. Announcement on day zero, after support and sales teams have the same talking points.
2. A personal call or message to your largest or most at-risk accounts within the first week.
3. A reminder at the halfway point to accounts that have not started migrating.
4. A final notice a few weeks before shutdown.
5. A confirmation after shutdown stating what was retained and for how long.

The records plan behind the notice

Retiring a product usually means retiring its systems: the support desk queue, the product analytics tool, the billing configuration, the staging environments, the repositories and the shared drives. The company keeps ownership of those records, and deletion is the default if nobody decides otherwise.

Work through this list before the shutdown date:

• Support history: export tickets with their resolutions, escalations and tags from the help desk.
• Engineering history: archive repositories, pull requests, issue trackers and release notes for the product.
• Customer correspondence: preserve account-manager email threads and chat channels about the product.
• Decision records: keep roadmap documents, the retirement decision memo and the migration plan.
• Operations: keep runbooks, incident reviews and on-call notes.
• Contracts and rights: note which customer agreements restrict reuse of data about their accounts.
• Owner: name one person who holds the exports and approves any later use.

Records of real work with outcomes, such as a ticket that was escalated and then resolved, are the kind of material AI developers need to train and evaluate agents, and they are thin on the public web. Whether any of it can be licensed depends on rights, which is why the rights line above comes before anything else.

Where a licensing introduction fits

If the company behind the product has 50+ full-time employees at peak (contractors excluded), several years of documented operations and an authorized sponsor, the retiring product's archives may be part of a wider licensing conversation. Companies keep ownership, data is licensed rather than sold, and nothing is binding until the company agrees price and terms and signs.

Partners only make introductions and give basic fit information. They never export, upload or describe confidential records. The company fit checker gives a preliminary, non-binding screen, and the who qualifies page sets out the baseline. To record an introduction cleanly, use the company introduction record template, and the introduction email builder helps draft an owner-approved message.

Partners earn 25% of the eligible platform fees SourceX actually collects from the referred company's licensing deals, capped at $100,000 per referred company, and only after the buyer pays and SourceX receives its fee. No reward is guaranteed.

What never goes into a notice or an introduction

• Customer names, ticket contents or any confidential record.
• A promise that the company will be paid or that a deal will close.
• Reward amounts or partner economics.
• Statements about refunds, warranties or data deletion that legal has not approved.

Related trigger moments carry their own records decisions: a reduction in force touches mailboxes and accounts, a WARN Act notice starts a clock, and an ERP migration retires job and quality history. Each is a chance to decide before the archive is deleted.

Next step

If you advise or sit on the board of a company retiring a product, ask who owns the exports before the shutdown date. Then register as a partner and, if the company fits, introduce its owner or CEO, who can also apply directly at sourcex.si/apply.