@kandyman It's shite when they go to the wall - I remember it was about 2006 when I got my first custom from Iron Noise and it blew my mind back in the day. Seeing something I'd written converted into film was just surreal. The KAK custom I had done is still the gold standard in my book.
Yeah - when the KAK site converted to paying a set amount per video things seemed to go mental! The original version of the discussion board went out of their minds about it, forecasting doom and gloom from what I recall, predicting your demise within 12 months :D I'd always worked on paying £1 per minute for each video - which was the same approach I'd taken with Iron Noise as well - and when you think about it, that's not far off the cost of a video here now. You look at third party hosting sites and they are charging $25-30 a video to purchase for maybe 6-8 minutes of content. I still have fond memories of AJ in a catsuit & goons in orange jumpsuits :) I also remember plugging KAK on the old Spy Femmes Fatale and RBG Production boards in Yahoo groups to try and drive some traffic in this direction. Again, that's two places that have either closed down completely (RBG) or have been taken over by other people and they are just shells for malware (Spy Femmes Fatales).
I'm not sure where the landscape with all this lies these days - I can name 10 producers off the top of my head that have called it quits in the last 10 years unfortunately with Cross The Line Entertainment finally closing down in 2019 - so keep on going for as long as you can. Those folks still making customs tend to be in eastern Europe now. While their prices are dirt cheap, all the feedback I've seen about them is that you never know if you're going to get what you've paid for & the production standards are...homemade at best. I've written a couple of scripts for people to have converted into movies and they rarely meet the client's expectations :(
