>>>They all have been good clients over the years and I don't want to take advantage.
>
>Is your goal a succession plan for longstanding good customers, or an asset sale? If a sale, definitely to the customer themselves, or possibly to another VFP entity to take it on?
>
>Do you have an existing maintenance agreement in the name of an entity (LLC, Corp) that can be sold with the IP?
>
>Depending on the clients, buying the source may not be much good to them without a reliable VFP person to call on. They may end up resenting your selling them a damp squib (sic)
>
>If you offer it to a VFP entity, they'd need to consider likely revenue vs investment required to familiarize themselves and commit availability. E.g. if there's only occasional maintenance to be had, that's unlikely to be worth the cost of familiarizing even if it's done with their usual framework. They're simply not going to be able to offer piecemeal maintenance for the generous prices you offered. So the customer should expect very large bills for the smallest thing, plus may face an annual maintenance fee or retainer to make it viable at all. I'd angle for a maintenance agreement since that gives the customer more certainty that they won't be left high and dry, which increases the value of the proposition today.
>

I'd interleave here with building a potential roadmap, involving larger customers to see i which direction further work might slant and get an idea of effort needed. With a roadmap talking to potential single maintainers becomes realistic - at least in part.

>In your shoes I'd tackle the succession plan first. Find somebody you'd be happy to hand it over to and who is interested. Then you can introduce the parties and explain your expectation that you are selling up and heading to Florida. ;-) Then you can help adjudicate who's best to end up owning (buying) your IP plus dependencies like annual maintenance agreements/retainers etc etc. Without appearing greedy, just keep it foremost that this is a sale not an asset transfer and it should become clearer who has appetite at what sort of price. As a last resort you can give it over and they can never resent you after you'd so diligently planned succession for them.