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I agree with you. As the author of a few popular open source projects [1] [2], it has been a fun ride, and I have learned a lot. However, the honeymoon period

by amzans 6y ago

I agree with you. As the author of a few popular open source projects [1] [2], it has been a fun ride, and I have learned a lot. However, the honeymoon period is over for me. The vast majority of the time it’s a lonely, thankless effort. The problem is that after several years and thousands of people and businesses using the software every day, very few actually take part in improving the project. Or even saying "thank you" to be honest. I’m happy to work on my project and fix issues, but please don’t abuse it. Being open source means that you can change the code if you want to, not to get a developer to work for you “out of love”. That’s why for my most recent project [3], I have decided to no longer start with an “open core” product. Instead it's a SaaS with a generous free tier. Price goes up the more value a customer gets out of it. Yes, people have already given me crap about not being open-source, but I do feel that so far it's a more sustainable model. [1] https://github.com/anthonynsimon/bild https://github.com/anthonynsimon/bild [2] https://traduora.com/ https://traduora.com/ [3] https://panelbear.com/ https://panelbear.com/

greggman3 6y ago
Have you thought about advertising $$$$$ for features? I suspect that's not something you have time for (nor do I) but I just brought it up because I have a friend that runs a semi-successful open source project and has managed to find companies willing to pay for support and new features to the point that he's fulltime on his project and has told me he was planning to hire one more person (I didn't follow up to see if he hired someone) On the converse, I hate the new culture of put up an open source project and ask for money, especially when that project is often very small and/or really just an assembly of 2-4 other open source projects. This seems especially common in npm/node projects now-a-days. Every repo I look at has a donate button for even the smallest of things.
- amzans 6y ago
  Hey thanks for the input. I haven't tried that approach yet, but I'll consider it for future endeavours. So far I'm quite happy with the SaaS approach as I'm able to prioritize my effort on improving the product for customers who support it via paid plans. As a one-man team it's important to reduce operational efforts. I like very much the idea of having monthly subscriptions with predictable cash flows. Let's see how it goes.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > So far I'm quite happy with the SaaS approach as I'm able to prioritize my effort on improving the product for customers who support it via paid plans. Note: the two approaches aren't mutually exclusive. You may even find that the folks who prefer to self-host the open-source version are leads to even more lucrative on-prem enterprise plans. The hard part to think about is segmentation of features between the open-source/free tier and the paid plan/enterprise versions. Of course, this is all becomes dramatically easier if you decide there is no difference feature-wise, and the differentiation is solely in volume of use and level of support.
- goostavos 6y ago
  Has your friend blogged about this approach? I'd be super interested to hear more! I'm one of those annoying people with a donate button. Despite my project's size (~10.5k stars on Github), it pulls down only about $60/month. While awesome, and I'm legit thankful for the people who back open source, it's obviously not yet at an amount where I could devote my time to open source entirely or even part time (which would be the dream!). My recent minor release took about 45 hours to prepare, then another 8 for a quick followup tacking on some additional functionality. Which is to say, open source gets me about $1/hr ^_^
gitgud 6y ago
Very sensible conclusion. I like open-source products, but they're not sustainable business models and require huge community effort. If you're a solo maintainer trying to make money, then a pure SaaS business is probably a better choice for everyone involved...
freedomben 6y ago
I completely understand the sentiment and I'm mostly there too to be honest. The one thing I fight to keep sight of is that there have to be more people just like me out there. People who deeply appreciate FLOSS work, who use it all the time, who's life has been greatly improved by it, who are willing to pay for it when they find something that is valuable, who learn lots of valuable design/implementation lessons from it by studying/hacking on the code. For those people I don't want to hide my code. Please consider a "source available" approach (at least for the "core").
alexellisuk 6y ago
It's funny how open-core gets berated on Hacker News and Reddit, as if it's somehow evil to make a living, with with decent OSS chops on you, someone is ready to call that an advertisement or self-promotion. As an industry we need to get a grip.

by amzans 6y ago

greggman3 6y ago

Have you thought about advertising $$$$$ for features? I suspect that's not something you have time for (nor do I) but I just brought it up because I have a friend that runs a semi-successful open source project and has managed to find companies willing to pay for support and new features to the point that he's fulltime on his project and has told me he was planning to hire one more person (I didn't follow up to see if he hired someone) On the converse, I hate the new culture of put up an open source project and ask for money, especially when that project is often very small and/or really just an assembly of 2-4 other open source projects. This seems especially common in npm/node projects now-a-days. Every repo I look at has a donate button for even the smallest of things.

amzans 6y ago
Hey thanks for the input. I haven't tried that approach yet, but I'll consider it for future endeavours. So far I'm quite happy with the SaaS approach as I'm able to prioritize my effort on improving the product for customers who support it via paid plans. As a one-man team it's important to reduce operational efforts. I like very much the idea of having monthly subscriptions with predictable cash flows. Let's see how it goes.
- webmaven 6y ago
  > So far I'm quite happy with the SaaS approach as I'm able to prioritize my effort on improving the product for customers who support it via paid plans. Note: the two approaches aren't mutually exclusive. You may even find that the folks who prefer to self-host the open-source version are leads to even more lucrative on-prem enterprise plans. The hard part to think about is segmentation of features between the open-source/free tier and the paid plan/enterprise versions. Of course, this is all becomes dramatically easier if you decide there is no difference feature-wise, and the differentiation is solely in volume of use and level of support.
goostavos 6y ago
Has your friend blogged about this approach? I'd be super interested to hear more! I'm one of those annoying people with a donate button. Despite my project's size (~10.5k stars on Github), it pulls down only about $60/month. While awesome, and I'm legit thankful for the people who back open source, it's obviously not yet at an amount where I could devote my time to open source entirely or even part time (which would be the dream!). My recent minor release took about 45 hours to prepare, then another 8 for a quick followup tacking on some additional functionality. Which is to say, open source gets me about $1/hr ^_^

gitgud 6y ago

Very sensible conclusion. I like open-source products, but they're not sustainable business models and require huge community effort. If you're a solo maintainer trying to make money, then a pure SaaS business is probably a better choice for everyone involved...

freedomben 6y ago

I completely understand the sentiment and I'm mostly there too to be honest. The one thing I fight to keep sight of is that there have to be more people just like me out there. People who deeply appreciate FLOSS work, who use it all the time, who's life has been greatly improved by it, who are willing to pay for it when they find something that is valuable, who learn lots of valuable design/implementation lessons from it by studying/hacking on the code. For those people I don't want to hide my code. Please consider a "source available" approach (at least for the "core").

alexellisuk 6y ago

It's funny how open-core gets berated on Hacker News and Reddit, as if it's somehow evil to make a living, with with decent OSS chops on you, someone is ready to call that an advertisement or self-promotion. As an industry we need to get a grip.