Once I started the process of preparing the company for sale, it did change a lot of the strategy

Everything was always that expensive, it was just less obvious. What if you had moved to outsource the office tasks sooner? Could you have better invested that time and stress elsewhere? The $100k per year improving hardware? Was that the best way to spend the money? Maybe it would have been better spent on marketing, or investing in reducing production costs with better tooling. Whatever the differential from what you spent was lost at 3x. Gains often compound over time too. Cost reduction begets cost reduction. Of course, thinking like this results in madness and moral hazard. I’ve seen companies do crazy, catastrophic things gearing up for sale.

> I'd been thinking about was how to allow users to purchase recurring subscriptions to their TinyPilot Pro software licenses rather than having to remember to re-purchase every year. I actually hate the 'flip' side of this. Over the last few years I've lost track of the number of services/providers who think it is just fine to renew annual subscriptions (in some cases $400+) with zero warning of upcoming renewal. It's not the amount of the service that bugs me, but the fact that that isn't a small chunk of change, and even a "Heads up, we'll be billing your card in a week for your annual subscription" email seems too much to ask for, to some.