Adventure travel online planning service PathWrangler will close this month, despite salvage offers from other companies.
CEO Doug Heinz sent an email to partners today to notify them of the site's demise from 21 March 2015.
PathWrangler was created in 2013 (TLabs here) in a bid to simplify the process of organising trips, often which include multiple tour operators.
The site is essentially a web app which brings the offline conversation together in an interactive place designed specifically for adventure and outdoor enthusiasts to organize trips together.
The idea was that it would work for everyone from "Himalayan guides to weekend warriors".
PathWrangler wanted to "take the conversation that normally occurs over emails, spreadsheets, PDFs, Word Docs, etc and put it into a central place where your team/group interacts with each other from a single version of the truth".
A few years on and things haven't quite worked out so well for the company.
The email today says:
"The primary reason is simple: we just don't have enough paying subscribers to make this thing go as a technology business anymore. We've been able to build a nice profitable business, which is rare for a tech company that hasn't taken any outside capital."
Heinz explains that he has been paying for most of the costs out of his own pocket, adding:
We just haven't been able to make enough money to take this web app to a place that our standards demand."
One option, he explains, was to raise the subscription rates, but he argues that increasing the fees was not something the company could do in "good conscience".
Interestingly, he claims there have been offers to buy the company but each was apparently only interested in grabbing the client base, rather than the technology.
"We didn't think it was in your interests to pass the buck to another entity. I didn't get into this business for the money, it was to serve a community.
"So, we've declined all of these purchase offers so far and don't see any potential with another company that shares our values in serving our clients."