Ask HN: Have you open sourced your software and still made money? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you open sourced your software and still made money?

22 pointsandrewstuart15 comments

I'd like to open source some of my software.

But I also want to make money.

I'm simply not in a position to dedicate the time to developing and maintaining software for no money.

So I am wondering.... are there any examples of anyone who has successfully open sourced their software and still found a way to make money from it?

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This is something I'm wondering about too. I recently made a piece of software [1] that users can self-host (released under MIT). I also want to offer the exact same thing as a service to users who can't self-host and simply just want a pluggable snippet for their static websites.

Obviously, if/when I offer the service, anybody who's tired of paying me money will simply spin up a VPS, install docker, pull my image, and run it themselves. It's fairly straightforward (and I'm happy that it's easy to self-host an instance of Commento). I'm just wondering if it is even worth it for me to offer this as a service. I'm not really looking for a huge profit - I'd be happy if it's simply self-sustainable (including development costs).

[1] https://github.com/adtac/commento

It probably will still be worth it. People are incredibly lazy and not everyone can be assed to self-host. You may think about adding another monetization incentive to your self-hosted version though. We are self-hosting a tool called Invoice Ninja, but paid a small one time fee, to not have their logo on our invoices.

Never under estimate the power of SaaS. You providing the service already up and running, maintaining it, will provide value for people wanting to use it.

Some will take the time to install/host their own. But many would be happy to subscribe and pay for something that just works.

Plus the time they would spend setting it up and maintaining it for most it would be a better value to pay monthly/annually for it.

Services can easily grow to eclipse your full time income.

Go for it.

I think an open source online commenting system, maybe like Commento, is worth offering as a service. Consider a commenting system that supports login-with-Facebook, Gmail, GitHub etcetera, spam protection, and email notifications (which I think most people leaving comments online want). Then, anyone who self hosts that open-source software, would need to do this, to get the same functionality as the hosted version:

- Sign up for e.g. a Digital Ocean Virtual Private Server

- Sign up for Akismet spam protection

- Sign up for some send-emails service

- Login to Gmail, read Google's tech doc about OpenAuth, and create OpenAuth credentials.

- Login to Facebook, read tech docs, create OpenAuth credentials.

- Github: read docs, create credentials.

- Forever onward, upgrade the server and software, to avoid security breaches.

This easily takes a whole day, because one will likely want to evaluate and compare different VPS and email providers, and also Google's and Facebook's OpenAuth documentation is not so easy to understand (I think). And a VPS + email service, is going to cost about $20 per month. ...

I imagine that for 99.5% of all people, buying a hosted service will be cheaper & save many days of work. Only somewhat large companies will want to self host?

(I'm building something similar to you b.t.w., https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments )

Yes, this is totally something worth offering hosted, especially for people with sites on Github Pages, Netlify etc., but also those that just want it to work and someone else take care of it. With more and more issues with the free options like Disqus, a paid alternative without the bullshit is attractive.

On the other hand, your estimation of cost and difficulty only applies to someone that would start hosting stuff just for this (and even then, the cost is still off for small use cases)

the last point is more critical and difficult to do it right. Comments are vulnerable to all sorts of xss/injection attacks and the functions that scan for them will have to be updated frequently..

Are you making money now that it's closed source?

Seeing, making money has nothing to do with it being open or closed source. Making money has to do with you wanting to make money and going out there and making it.

There are success stories of folks with opensource making lots of money. MongoDB just went public. You can also find counterexamples.

If you believe in open source and believe it's the best thing for your project, then you will do so without regards to profit or not.

If you believe in making money, won't matter if your project was closed or open, you will also focus on that.

Are you making money now that it's closed source?

Making money has nothing to do with it being open or closed source. Making money has to do with you wanting to make money and going out there and making it.

There are success stories of folks with opensource making lots of money. MongoDB just went public. You can also find counterexamples.

If you believe in open source and believe it's the best thing for your project, then you will do so without regards to profit or not.

If you believe in making money, won't matter if your project was closed or open, you will also focus on that.

Mike Perham's Sidekiq[0] does okay I guess[1].

[0] https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq

y, $800k is doing pretty OK.

Congrats to him.

There are a couple of ways to make money from OSS. My fav is having a paid managed version. Ghost[1] and Discourse[2] are good examples of this. (I am using the same model for a personal project [3]). See https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand for more ways.

[1] http://ghost.org [2] http://discourse.org [3] http://suet.co

Check out Taylor Otwell the creator of Laravel.

Laravel is a (Rails Like) PHP framework. It's really great, highly recommended.

It is open source, has a great community.

Taylor also created forge and envoyer they are services, they are great tools for spinning up servers for Laravel projects, and zero downtime deployments.

They appear to provide his full time income+ and allowed him to hire a developer to work on Laravel, forge, envoyer and Spark (a product offering that is best described as SaaS in a box) full time.

So he's helping the community providing a great framework and bringing in revenue.

Laravel is something great for developers to learn to level up to better and higher paying projects and gigs. Similar to the learning Rails early on.

Thanks Taylor!

I think it's your model of operating the software is more then your source. Open source encourage technical knowledge sharing and collaboration work. However it can't replace one's or a company's dedicated effort. Imagine Uber open-sourced, it's as hard as it is to be to replicate it's business and value.

We are working on a software called skygear (https://skygear.io) as well. It's open-sourced from the first day.

Here [0] is a great discussion about this topic that came up on HN a few months ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446516

You can charge for support services.

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