You might be able to make money by providing customised solutions to your clients using open source software. If your open source product can be run as a SaaS,

You might be able to make money by providing customised solutions to your clients using open source software. If your open source product can be run as a SaaS, you might be able to make money by providing no-hassle hosting (think Ghost or WordPress). Another option might be providing a open source core and then selling additional closed-source features (e.g. GitLab) But if you simply want to sell your open source product to customers so they can run it themselves, then it's impossible. It's a dream for many developers and there are some success stories, but they are always the exception not the norm. Solutions like selling support, or even worse, charging for documention, are simply unappealing to both developers and users. There is another option - one that some open source advocates dislike: source-only products i.e. you sell you software product to customers to run them themselves. You give them the source code of your product so they can customise it to meet their needs. But the software is not open source and cannot be shared the way open source can. There are actually lots of successful source-only products that are sustaining their creators full-time. Two examples: Craft CMS and Kirby CMS - both publish their source code on GitHub and rely on the honesty of their customers to pay (which they do). They have a thriving community of developers making plugins and extensions - proving that you can create a community of developers around a 'source-only' product.