I own a commercial softwarecompany and we build software for non-profit. We create software for education (schools) and give the full rights on the code back to the schools. This give them a way to get rid of expensive license models (EUR 15 per student for poorly build software is no expception). We build internal tools for students and teachers. Sometimes integrated in Microsoft Teams and Azure. We use PHP (Laravel Livewire) and Python (FastAPI, Django).

This organisation is not going to make me rich. We are interested in becoming a non-profit organisation ourselves in the future.

My learnings so far:

- The elephants of the industry are perfectly organised to win the public tenders

- The product they deliver checks all the boxes, but is poorly exectuted. Leaving schools with expensive, restricted contracts for 5 years

- They earn money by asking an amount per student per year. A simple synchronisation tool (to sync agendas between 2 sytems) costs them EUR 2 per student per year. (We built that in 2 weeks and give it away for free these days)

- We work for 65 schools. At least 12 of them bought software for 100-150k per year that they do not use (bugs, bad UI).

- We are cheap compared to the market, but we charge fair. Our profit is very low (10% or less) but we cover all costs and pay 3 fulltime developers. We have work for years.