Manilla just had quite a week.

The bill payment and account management startup released a major update to its iOS app last Monday — and announced it would cease operations this summer on Friday. That sequence of events could indicate that the decision to shut down on July 1 came as a surprise. It also casts doubt on the viability of free services that fail to gain mass adoption or define clear revenue opportunities.

The company said this on its blog: “We were unable to achieve the scale necessary to make the economics of the business viable.” Why update the app a few days earlier, then?

Perhaps American consumers just were not organized enough for Manilla. The service helped users manage everything from airline miles to magazine subscriptions. Manilla announced that it had 500,000 users in July 2013 and was a product of the Hearst Corp.

Not anymore. It can no longer be downloaded for either iOS or Android devices.

Rival Check, meanwhile, is rumored to be in the early stages of being acquired by Intuit, which also owns Mint, a personal financial management tool.

Here’s how Manilla described it’s latest update in the App Store just one week ago:

What’s New in Version 4.3.0

In this release we’ve added a host of features that you’ve been asking for — you can now:

• Upload photos from your phone as documents. Need a picture of that receipt for your expense report? Want to add your lease to your Rent account? We’ll store it on Manilla and you can access it as a .pdf like any other document on the site.
• Track spending habits over time to see if you’re staying in your budget. We’ve added Historical Data to your account screen so you can see your end-of-month bill over the last few months for credit card accounts (more account types coming soon!).
• Remember offline events in your accounts with the new Notes feature. Want to remember the open ticket number for your phone account? Need to remind yourself of the account rep’s name? Keep it in Notes and you’ll have access to it on your phone or web.

We hope Manilla continues to help you save time, save money, and simplify your daily life.

This hardly seems like a company on the verge of shutting down.

Manilla had some wins recently, including a partnership with AOL in 2013 and being named a “Best New App” in the iOS App Store last March. (This designation apparently has little to do with being “new,” as Manilla was launched in Sept. 2011 and released version 4.3.0 last week.) It was also nominated for a Webby award for the Financial Services/Banking category in April 2013.

A request for comment from Manilla received a boilerplate answer containing instructions for shutting down an account, followed by a note from the head of marketing, Marc Karasu, pointing us to the official FAQ. A similar request to the press department at Hearst has so far gone unanswered.