I should have updated this last week as I had raised enough money and I'm starting a job next Monday. So things should be grand going forward for now.
I'm in a similar position now, so if anyone is looking for a full-stack TypeScript engineer with open-source background (https://github.com/mishushakov) let's chat!
I highly recommend and wish he moved back to the old pricing where he was allowing people to use it for personal use but was charging for commercial use. And it was super flexible since if you couldn't afford it, he mentioned you can email. Many more would pay for sure.
Plausible started in 2019. Not sure when [name redacted] started. Clicking on "blame" for the readme file in the repo, I see a commit from 5 years ago.
I can very much empathize that adding a "buy" button is a hump to get over when you just wanna build something cool and share it with like-minded people. I have the same issue with every project I build. I guess one should train to jump over one's shadow in this regard.
"Hello, world" - [name redacted] committed on May 28, 2019 - [link redacted]
Plausible:
"Initial commit" - ukutaht committed - on Sep 2, 2019 - 779d64e19a26a4e4944d4f0d7d9e280a27fbc6e5 - https://github.com/plausible/analytics/commit/779d64e19a26a4...
[link redacted]
Giving it away for free didn't help, but "making money" was never really a goal as such. I think "being free" is important if you want to be a viable alternative for Google Analytics. €9/month is nothing for a business, but who is paying that for a blog or hobby site (or even some small businesses)?
I already decided a few years ago that "covers hosting" is good enough. It's just that circumstances conspired to put in this rather uncomfortable position.
To be fair, not sure if this is a pro or contra: [name redacted] wouldn't need to exist, if google didn't find the way they did, to make money.
Anyway, cool product. Love OSS but don't mind paying for simple solutions as a business. It's not only about saving time but also about keeping focus.
I was trying to. I highly recommend you to bring back the paid plans. Just leave it as it was. Opt-in for personal and for small commercial websites, paid plan. Like someone else mentioned, for a business, invoices helps a lot to bill as expense if they want to pay you.
You don’t need to optimize to earn tons of money, but minimum threshold should more than just good enough. So, if things go wrong, you can spend that reserve and actually be on a “good enough” position until you figure things out
This also validates that maybe something like Setapp for SaaS or Spotify for SaaS might be a good business model.
Plausible also has a co-founder who does marketing, and is evidently very good at it. That's perhaps a more important factor in success than simply offering a paid plan.
It looks like success was far from guaranteed before he was hired ($400 MRR and not growing). https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas#february-looking-...
It undermines the nominal reason for the enterprise's existence (competition) but once a single competitor begins practicing it, everyone else also has to- not to any benefit, but just to maintain their status quo.
This is far, far too cynical. Marketing is not cheating. To keep the sports metaphor, marketing is training. It's unglamorous, time-consuming, and (for most) not fun. But, if you want to succeed as a professional, you have to do it.
If no one was paying, but people were still writing, the best solutions would likely bubble to the top. But as soon as someone pays for placement, everyone needs to. You end up with a new normal that’s the same as before (modulo those products that are better at marketing) but everyone had to pay a bunch of money.
Short of literally banning advertising, there’s no way around it/any serious business needs to do it. But I get the take that it’s a cost that is only necessary because everyone else is doing it.
I think that's far from guaranteed. It could very well be the case that the oldest, most established, solutions would dominate the top, for instance.
I think the situation is almost guaranteed to be worse because there are now stronger incentives to manipulate and deceive.
Product, price, place, promotion.
All of those are marketing. Yes, even the product itself is marketing. When people claim they are not doing marketing, but going by word of mouth, they are using the product itself as marketing.
I would argue that customer service and the actual job done are part of the product, since they’re part of the value you’re delivering to the customer. By that logic one could include the warm fuzzy feeling they get from some really slick copy, but to my mind it feels different. I’m having trouble formalizing the line here.
I’ll also concede that there are things that fall under the aegis of “marketing” that are not direct transfers of money for placement - e.g. cold calling, content marketing, SEO, etc. many of them are zero-sum games, a few are not.
Being able to find customers and explain your products value to them, that being marketing, is an essential part of producing a product.
Flipping the microscope, paid promotions distract from honest testimonials with no profit motive.
"We are improving your search results by prepending sales brochures."
Also it seems like your gripe is actually with advertising, which would be more sensible. Simply being against marketing is merely proof that you can't possibly understand what marketing is.
- "Hey, here's something interesting you might be interested in!"
- "Drink Coca Cola"
The second type of marketing is the sort of zero-sum game you're talking about. Everyone already knows about this, Coca Cola and Pepsi spend phenomenal amounts of money, and it kind of just cancels out.
But the first type of marketing is rather different. The simplest kind is making something and then telling people that you made it.
Sure we could guess and randomly reach out to companies to ask if they provide it. Answering those inquiries could easily be considered marketing, though.
When you are tapping a new market, absolutely nobody knows about your company, your product and the problems it solves. In fact, often you even have to educate your customer that they have an opportunity to improve their business/life with your product.
Yes, I agree. This is also what I told the NLnet people a few years back, but while there's a lot of budget for specific technical things, there isn't really any money set aside for more "soft" aspects like this.
I don't see to choose this over various alternatives.
Indie devs need to understand this, put up a pro plan and a checkout link that sends an invoice so that finance folks are ok.
I hope he pulls through this, we need more indie software.
I hope not. I have a CS degree, but some of the best and most prolific developers I've had the pleasure to work with have all be self-taught. One of the most talented .Net developers I've ever worked with had a masters degree in philosophy and was a trained furniture maker, when those things failed to pay the bills he taught himself C# and was easily the most talented and creative developer on our team.
Selecting developers based on education is moronic, the self-taught people are often really talented and I can easily find CS majors who can't program at all. Education has almost zero reflection on your ability as a developer.
> Education has almost zero reflection on your ability as a developer.
Can we stop using the word "education" as a propaganda word like this?
When people use the word like this, what they really mean is "institutionalized education and/or indoctrination."
In what cases do people use the word "education" to mean something else than "institutionalized education"?
I feel like it's pretty clear what they mean by that, without having to make it into a political statement of "institutionalized indoctrination".
People who say the opposite are thinking of developers, often themselves, who were able to become skilled without a CS degree. That is indeed quite possible, and I've met many individuals in this category. I'm not going to say the best developers I've met had no degree, but I've met great developers without a degree. But I wouldn't say it is common; most developers without a CS/STEM degree whom I've met were, indeed, mediocre engineers that often had no business being there.
I've also met many poor developers from great schools and great developers from schools with poor reputation. But, as a thought experiment, if I was to pick a developer based solely on whether they have a degree and where they got this degree, lacking any other piece of information, I'd always pick the ones with a degree from a reputable school.
If you discriminate based on having a CS degree, you are lopping off a big portion of the right tail which is where all the people you actually want to hire are.
Regardless, you should have better chances of not being filtered out with small, profitable, companies.
It doesn't carry much signal for being great.
Thanks for making me laugh, I think that's worth a few bucks.
I donated every year to Wikipedia until I learned that (1) they have a huge chest of money, (2) their expenses could be much lower if they were not a 500-man SF company.
I'm using him for 4 of my personal websites ( 172, 1135, 25 and 22 visits in the last month ). Satisfied with the product so I've sponsored him on github.
Also: sometimes, life is just brutal - admitting you actually do need help (and even moreso in such a public way) itself has to be rewarded and commended!
This may or may not be related to ethics, depending on what one calls or defines as ethics, but the reality is that free rides always carry a risk, even if there is no ethical obligation to pay for the ride. Of course, that depends on what value one gives to the code, and stuff like the cost of not being able to use it in the future due to lack of maintenance, or the cost of having to put in effort to maintain it oneself. But while there are no such ethical obligations tied to the use of some free software per se, imo there are ethics (or "ethics") tied to the interdepedencies and connections within such a social system in the sense of it being sustainable and able to self-perpetuate.
Even if the developer is a millionaire, it's proper to chip in a few bucks for free stuff that you use and enjoy. Sob story or no sob story.
But honestly, the real solution is for people to stop with this open source nonsense and start charging for their work. There are thousands of potential customers for every boutique app or code solution.
Nobody is entitled to free code, especially not the billion dollar companies who are the main beneficiaries of the hard work of open source programmers.
Social security in Ireland is similar to UK and you have to apply for any job to qualify.
or
Things are getting to the point he literally would do anything to not end up homeless.
I do not know much about [name redacted] and the creator but after looking at his resume, I feel he obviously has a very marketable skills and with over 10+ year of experience, I feel one should have enough put away for rough times like this (forgive me if I am missing some context about this specific case, but I think this point applies in general to everyone imho)
I've had my own troubles in the past (and learned from it), where I made unwise investment choices and when some unforeseen circumstances came up, I found myself cash-poor and struggling a bit, even though I was employed at that time.
Here's the wiki from bogleheads [0] that gives a good framework on how to think about investing and what to prioritize. First thing to do if you do not already, when the times are good is to build an emergency fund.
[0] https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Prioritizing_investments
I self-host his [name redacted] on a fun site of mine. I like this style of app: small, simple binary that can share a machine with lots of other things.
Because it's not always simple and being a good developer in many cases doesn't overlap with being good at marketing or business as it's not what they are passionate about. There's a good blog post about Plausible Analytics before and after the marketing co-founder joined, wasn't able to find it right now though.
Have nothing else to add other than [name redacted] has been awesome.
1. Find a way to also count users with Ad Blocker. Google Analytics and even Plausible (unless when self hosted) don't track users with an Ad Blocker.
2. Show how many users are using an Ad Blocker, this is a very important metric when a site is relying on ad revenue. It turned out that 30-33% of my traffic was using an Ad Blocker, which prompted me to implement a fallback where I show the user a banner with an affiliate link instead.
3. Offer an unlimited free tier, under the condition that a summary of the stats is visible to everyone, a bit like Github used to work. Users can then hide to make their stats private.
That said, I do wish tools like uBlock would make it easier to give people more choice in what to block and not block, but that's not up to me (also in terms of ads; the other day I saw a site which has just <img src="/ad.png">, which I don't really see any problem with, and uBlock goes out of its way to block that – meh).
Had to rename the bundle.
Thanks for [name redacted] btw, I've got a little website that hosts useful information that's hard to find otherwise for a little community (~20 visits / day) and [name redacted] has been reliably telling me whether or not people still use it for a few years now.
Have a case of beer on me, mate.
The only exception to the rule is the Internet Archive.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/84439-2010-wikipedia-fundrai...
[link redacted]
No shit sherlock!
> I really hate to Jimmy Wales people about this and it's rather embarrassing.
But the Jimmy Wales ref made me laugh so much i've just sent xx quid.
This is Darwinism.
If the author has a seemingly popular and monetisable (sic) product with real users, yet has failed to achieve the state of ramen profitable, then perhaps this is fate.
Perhaps he's not able to be at the helm of a product that people would rely on in their production apps.
What if the author of this app is unable to run the product successfully and is forced to close it down. What happens to the thousands of users who have integrated his product in their stack? An expensive migration. Loss of profit for them.
Perhaps it's better to choose another product that is able to be profitable.
That’s why many businesses would not consider a free service or a product. The developer of SQLite sells licenses for his public domain code for this very reason.
I knew my comment would be downvoted.
Interestingly, one comment above said the author did not release an update in over a year...
If you want money ask for it and I don't mean donations. The strange dynamic where you collect street cred in exchange for your work and expect to be taken care for doesn't work. Even if he finds a job and doesn't need donations, he will be working for people who wanted money and asked for it. It's the same thing with directly asking money for your services but with extra steps where you pay other people for doing the asking.