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Comment by quaintdev | Hacker News Reader

So what prevents someone from bypassing the license check and run the version of application locally?

Most EmailEngine's customers are small-ish SaaS providers (different kinds of niche CRMs, etc), and in their position, it is not really an option to spend time / risk breaking copyright protections. Instead, they pay the subscription fee and get into building email integration features for their service.

TBH, I wouldn't dare to use such a model in the B2C market, though. Everyone would pirate it.

For niche applications, it's not that terrible. I've produced an SQL IDE for years with a license key that sold <=100 individual purchases per year. I've only spoken to one person I believed pirated it. I've now went the opposite direction and made it free.

Nice! https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/

What led you to making it free?

Probably fear that this is the kind of red flag that would show up in due diligence, and that having piracy as part of the foundation of the tech stack that you build your business on is not a worthwhile risk to take.

Honesty? (haha)

More seriously:

- you get support by paying, this is important for many businesses - $1k/year is cheap

- risk of getting sued if the word gets out you're using something against its license (and for network-facing code, I'd suspect it's easy enough to miss something)

For me the advantage of source-available is you can always shortcut the support if there's a business critical problem and you can't wait for the author to wake up, so I think it's a great model.

I'm curious how much time a solo dev spends on support for a project like this. I can imagine some companies asking for a tremendous amount of support, or even trying to somehow get free consultation on adjacent concerns that aren't totally related to the product. Maybe it's just a matter of setting clear boundaries and limiting time?

I do support once a day for about an hour. I do monitor notifications for support emails during the day to react faster for urgent issues but there rarely is anything urgent. I guess the self-hosting side keeps support demand lower - if you are already capable of installing and running that software you can probably figure most of your issues out yourself.

Updates, support and no losing developer time to updates and support. Sub $1k is a bargain for something so integral.

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