19 ms·

Why I Didn't Open-Source My Second SaaS

193 points by amzans 6y ago

Jaygles 6y ago
I don't think the author made a compelling argument as to why open-sourcing his code led to the problems he describes. It sounds like having the code open sourced took too much of his time away since it allowed people to make requests for things. But I don't see why that means he necessarily has to take time to fulfill the requests. Sounds like he was too focused in one area of his project, and needed to take a step back to get a broader view of the state of things. I'm not convinced the closed/open source nature of his code is responsible for that.
- mooreds 6y ago
  I think his point was that folks who participate in open source have higher demands for changes and support. If a business is pure SaaS only with no open source code behind it, there is less interaction in general. I'm sure there's still support tickets and whatnot, but there's not the same level of "please fix this" requests. People just move on from commercial packages if they don't do what they need, in my experience. From the post: > In the past, when it came to running a business as a solo-founder, having it open source created too much maintenance burden for very specific feature requests. In particular from non-paying users, who sometimes sent me emails directly, demanding I look at their issue, or help them fix things “as soon as possible”. This lack of interaction is both a feature (lets you focus, you have time to take care of paying users) and a bug (less interaction means you could build the wrong thing, the source is no longer a marketing mechanism for you).
  - Jaygles 6y ago
    Right, I agree with you, but as I said > It sounds like having the code open sourced took too much of his time away since it allowed people to make requests for things. But I don't see why that means he necessarily has to take time to fulfill the requests. The existence of the interactions doesn't necessitate engaging with them. If engaging with interactions is taking too much time away, one could simply, not engage with them.
    - mooreds 6y ago
      > The existence of the interactions doesn't necessitate engaging with them. If engaging with interactions is taking too much time away, one could simply, not engage with them. Sure, I get it, everyone needs to prioritize. But if you are ignoring interactions on your OSS project, you can expect more, oh, I'll call it 'heat'. I have seen those github issue threads, where people get frustrated because someone hasn't engaged. So if you aren't going to engage, why open source it? Sure, there are other reasons, but the community feedback loop is a crucial part of the value of OSS for building a business. Also, I get there's nuance and you can choose to engage when there's been a certain level of commitment from the community (a number of upvotes is what my current company uses to help prioritize efforts), but for a solo founder it can be really hard to prioritize, and the author apparently found all the requests a distraction. His choice, but I sympathize.
      - Jaygles 6y ago
        There's certainly value in engaging with the community through the open sourced code. In the end its all a balancing act and getting it right is the hard part. I'm not trying to claim to know how much effort should be going in each aspect. If I did, I'd be running a successful business right about now.
      - bachmeier 6y ago
        > Sure, I get it, everyone needs to prioritize. But if you are ignoring interactions on your OSS project, you can expect more, oh, I'll call it 'heat'. I have seen those github issue threads, where people get frustrated because someone hasn't engaged. Companies selling non-OSS products get slammed with requests on a large scale and they have to deal with them somehow. Todoist immediately comes to mind. I mean, sure, it's possible that some users of a paid product will conclude you don't know what you're doing and take their business elsewhere, but that's kind of like boasting about fixing your broken finger by cutting off your arm.
        brobdingnagians 6y ago
        I think the key thing is whether the people making the feature requests are paying you. We get feature requests all the time, but they are the people paying us thousands of dollars, so those take priority. If they aren't, or it doesn't appear that anyone else paying us will use it, then they shouldn't take priority. This is a way of whittling down what is really valuable to people, rather than just they took long enough to write an email about a cool thing they really think you should do.
- serial_dev 6y ago
  Exactly, I think people misunderstand what open source means. Open source doesn't mean that you need to provide hours of free support to someone who couldn't even bother to write a proper issue description. For a matter of fact, you don't even need to provide free support to anyone, no matter how nice they are and no matter how well they written the issue You can help them, but you don't have to. You also don't need to accept pull requests: if you think that the feature doesn't make sense or the code quality is terrible, or it's just not important to you, you don't need to accept pull requests. You also don't need to bend over backwards to maintain a stabile API. It makes your life easier if you communicate this in the README of the package, tell people that it's the early days of the product, you develop in the open, but you aren't going to abide by other people's unrealistic expectations about your open source work.
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    >Exactly, I think people misunderstand what open source means. "Misunderstand" implies there's some authoritative definition on "open source" means here. I remember people considering Dasura "not open source" even though it was GPLv2, simply because they didn't accept patches and only threw code over the wall. To a lot of people, open source means engaging on Github. You can say "they're wrong", but that's just disagreement.
  - ipaddr 6y ago
    I find just throwing code into github is my perfect level of open sourcing. It's public and I can pull the code into any project. No pesky user requests or stars. Accepting pull requests on smaller projects seems strange. If I wrote this why do I want someone else sharing credit.
- j_san 6y ago
  While it's technically not open-sourcing code itself it's human nature in my opinion. As a founder you want to support and don't upset your customers, even if they are using the free version of your product. Yes, you could simply not fulfill these requests or not help these customers, but I think for most people it will still introduce stress. There may be people who can deal easily with this, but I think it's natural to be stressed by this and run after things that you shouldn't. Still I agree that it's probably possible to open-source without these problems and that this is not a complete compelling argument for every case. For me personally at least not open-sourcing at the beginning (like the author did) would probably be preferred as well for a solo-founded project.
  - KajMagnus 6y ago
    > I think for most people it will still introduce stress [... ] run after things that you shouldn't. I think so too. There's personality trait that I wonder if it is related to this: Agreeable vs Assertive, in the Big 5 personality traits, (Actually I wrote a sibling reply (sibling to yours) and mentioned this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26433328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26433328 hmm maybe it'd been better if I had replied to you instead :- ) didn't see your reply until now though.)
- jandrewrogers 6y ago
  My experience is strongly aligned with the author's. There is a substantial real-world overhead associated with open sourcing code, all other things being equal. This overhead is imposed on you whether you want it or not. If you are operating in a resource constrained environment, like the author, then not open sourcing is a sensible cost containment measure. Open sourcing code is a luxury for those with ample time or money. I have code I could open source (e.g. some very useful Postgres extensions created for a company) but I value my time more, and I know many others that view the calculus similarly. There is value in open sourcing code but we should be honest about the associated costs and not pretend they don't exist.
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    I'd tend to agree for a small package. But, this was a company with a community (according to author). Pointing requests to the paid support page would turn lemons into lemonade. We can only speculate why this didn't happen.
  - 3np 6y ago
    Shat kind of overhead do you mean, exactly? You could just push it to a public repo on GH/GL/whatever, and then choose your own level of involvement? You don’t have to engage or even provide a means of contact.
    - mkj 6y ago
      Github doesn't allow disabling pull requests, so there's always that means of contact.
      - 3np 6y ago
        Right, I think this can be done in GitLab though, if one doesn't want to self-host?
- KajMagnus 6y ago
  > I'm not convinced the closed/open source nature of his code is responsible for that Could that depend on the personality traits of the solo founder? What if it's in some people's nature, to feel bad about rejecting make-sense feature request and bug fixes, in order to instead focus on money making things? (Even if logically it'd be the long term good thing to do.) Whilst someone else might have felt just fine, doing that? If you know about the Big 5 personality traits, maybe this is related to where you are, in the Agreeable vs Assertive dimension. For someone who is more Agreeable, then, keeping the SaaS closed source, might be the way to go — so there simply won't be any unsupported platform installation problems to ignore but feel bad about.
marvinblum 6y ago
A few months ago, I've started a similar analytics project [0], which I have now turned into a product [1] together with my co-founder. The difference to Panelbear is, that I've started this to be used on my personal website, so it was open-source right from the beginning and without the intention to make money. In fact, you can still use our core library for free (AGPL licensed). When we looked at the other solutions out there, we saw that a lot of them offer a self-hosted version for free. Giving away whole products for free has become a trend I don't anticipate. You can be sure there is an open-source, free as in free beer replacement for almost anything, which makes it really hard to build a sustainable business. While you can generate some traction off of it, you also have to deal with people asking for free support, new features, bug fixes, and so on. I have quite a lot of open-source projects, one of them is a game server management web UI [2]. It breaks my heard every time I have to tell someone that I can't support their request. There are cases where it makes sense to have the product fully open-source of course, like an operating system, or anything that can be considered "infrastructure". Writing software is difficult and it takes countless hours to build something useful that is non-trivial. If it's something a lot of people rely on, think about charging for it, instead of giving it away for free. But in the end it's your time after all. [0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch [1] https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/ [2] https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  Free offerings are a great way to stifle competition. When it's coming from OSS developers who are not making money themselves, it's indeed head scratching.
vemv 6y ago
How about: business logic is and remains private, but support libraries, boilerplate, etc is offered as discrete OSS repositories. This isn't too fancy - quite commonly corps and startups alike offer some generic libraries. One can take that pattern to greater degrees. This allows to scratch the itch of sharing something with the community, while still guaranteeing a livelihood. Of course, it's mostly an incompatible approach for those favoring a strict monorepo- and microservice-based architecture.
- marvinblum 6y ago
  Agreed. If it's something that has no business value in itself and can be adopted by others (which might contribute in return), open-source it. There are also half-open/open-core models, see my comment below.
- mooreds 6y ago
  We do this with a lot of our stuff at my current employer. It's a good compromise in my experience.
- zomglings 6y ago
  git submodules, despite their warts, do help incorporate a bunch of distinct code bases into a monorepo.
  - vemv 6y ago
    That might be also considered a multirepo in disguise :)
    - zomglings 6y ago
      Haha - you are right, and it is why git submodules have warts. One thing I will say for them - at least you know explicitly which commits of your dependencies you are using.
- mattbuilds 6y ago
  I have a similar plan with my current project [0] of interactive coding docs. The library to build the docs would be OSS. So anyone could build it and use it in their projects, But the business of hosting courses, payment, an advanced UI for building the docs would all be a SaaS. I think it's a nice balance that gives you the best of both worlds. [0] https://devbyexample.com https://devbyexample.com
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
I once thought that the worst in opensource are forum people (later replaced by GitHub people) who demand premium service when they encounter a bug. But then I learned that the worst in opensource are users with access to reviews with rating: I give you 1/5 because the app doesn't do what I want and you don't kiss my ass nice enough. You don't know how to treat your customers right, how childish of you to ask money to fix my particular problem!! For some reason a lot of people believe that leaving a review with bad rating for a free and opensource app will motivate the developers fix the issue asap, in hope that the user will change the rating to 2/5.
- hydroxideOH- 6y ago
  This is what happens with my open source Chrome extension's reviews on the Chrome Web Store. Not that you can really make money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life.
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    > Not that you can really make money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life. Why not? There's successful projects selling or based around extensions.
  - Glench 6y ago
    Heh, it is totally possible to make money off extensions. You just need to provide value. Here are some examples: - $100k with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/css-scan-made-over-100k-d6d2146f11 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/css-scan-made-over-100k-d6... - $38k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/187-jordan-oconnor-of-closet-tools https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/187-jordan-oconnor-of-c... - $3.1k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/night-eye https://www.indiehackers.com/product/night-eye - $2.5k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/weather-extension-ad9b94660e https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/weather-extension-ad9...
    - 6y ago
sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
Very good read, Thanks!
candiddevmike 6y ago
I came to a similar junction with my app. It's B2C SaaS, and I bluntly want to earn money for all the years I put into it. I chose to add a free tier and self hosting as a compromise. In the future, I would love to open source it. But for now, all I see in other B2C/consumer OSS projects is a lot of complaining, frustration, and extra work without a benefit to my paying customers.
mattkrick 6y ago
I built an open-source B2B SaaS that recently raised its Series A. While I'm not a solo founder, we were a team of 3 up until we raised our seed. The difference I see is traduora looks like a project, not a company. Sell support! Don't give it away for free. If someone asks me for a bugfix, I show them the ticket in our open backlog & tell them if they want it done faster, they have to pay. Seeing their concern turned in to a ticket shows them that I care, but telling them I prioritize paid fixes tells them it's not a charity. Don't let them feel entitled.
- jandrese 6y ago
  If they opt to not pay do you leave the bug in your system forever? I've always been a little annoyed at this model, because with so many companies it comes down to "I paid you $120,000/year for this support contract and you're telling me you've been able to track down this bug I reported, but you're not going to fix it because it's not on the project your developers are currently working on." And then they get really miffed if you drop the support contract next year, telling us how we'll be locked out of security and feature updates, even though there were zero releases in the past calendar year. If I'm playing for the equivalent of a full time junior developer I expect at least some action on my bug reports.
  - gcheong 6y ago
    If they opt not to pay then the bug gets fixed according to severity and priority in the regular development cycles. It's possible it will never get fixed. I see your point with paid support contracts that don't give you anything, and you would be justified to cut your losses, but I think this was more specific to individual bugs that a company wants to up the priority for.
  - thayne 6y ago
    They way I wish it worked, although I haven't seen it really successfully implemtented is that instead of paying for a support contract, you could pay for support in a more a la carte manner. Such as say, pledging money to a bug or feature, and the dev team prioritizes based on how much money is pledged for different features and bugs, perhaps with some expiration so customers don't end up paying for a bug that isn't fixed until years later when it no longer matters.
kureikain 6y ago
I used to swear by Open Source try to build an uptime monitoring but failed https://github.com/yeo/notyim https://github.com/yeo/notyim and a few other thing. Eventually one day I want to do email forwarding, I was thinking open source or not and pretty much chooese to go with close-source for now. I can see myself open source in the future when I get enough customers and I have more time to cleanup the private stuff in our mono repository right now. But for an early self-bootstrap self-funded I feel like focus too much on Open Source and I don't have time to focus on the growth or marketing. I finally release my first SaaS this year, make $78/month right now(don't laugh at me). https://hanami.run https://hanami.run I would say I'm not against opensource and it definetely work for others, but for me, by not going open source I can focus on the business itself. With that being, I contributed back such as a mail parser https://github.com/yeo/parsemail https://github.com/yeo/parsemail https://github.com/yeo/pix https://github.com/yeo/pix I can imagine myself release a lite-version(our early prototype) where we can forward email using a config file, instead of a database with all the user, membership stuff that no one care about if you want to self-hosted my SaaS.
StavrosK 6y ago
This is semi off topic, but the sentence "housing in Munich has gone insane" struck me. Housing in my city in Greece has gone crazy too, a two-bedroom apartment costs significantly more than minimum wage, and I don't know who can afford to stay there. Does anyone why housing everywhere seems to be going nuts? This can't be a good sign.
- sofixa 6y ago
  > Does anyone why housing everywhere seems to be going nuts? This can't be a good sign. It will depend on the location, but usually a mix of more people in the big cities, inflation, low interest rates ( so low mortgage rates), physical constraints ( most cities can't sprawl forever), sometimes regulations ( like zoning). It's mostly in big cities though, go to a small one without any obvious geographic advantage ( like being on the seaside), and prices are usually much lower and stagnating. Also depending on location, IMHO the pandemic has shown to a lot of people that remote work is possible and can be productive, so there will be some moves towards smaller cities and villages + remote working for big city businesses.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    That makes sense, thanks. I expected prices in the big city to drop too in the pandemic (at least because of a drop in tourism), but, if anything, they've gone up...
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  This is how it happens in California, do many of these happen in Europe? - Populations are growing. - Younger folks would rather live in the city. - Sets of homeowners and voters heavily overlap. - Government supports homeowners via tax policy, all housing is already taken. - Existing homeowners prevent new construction. - Some portion of renters enjoying rent control also support NIMBY policies. A perfect recipe for housing scarcity and therefore high prices.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    If anything, populations here are declining, the set of voters is basically "everyone", or near enough, owning a home isn't particularly supported? Though not discouraged either, there is quite a bit of new construction, but on the outskirts of the city (as happens usually), and there are no rent-control policies. This is why I'm mystified as to what's driving prices up, I've heard things like increasing tourism making owning a home a good investment, foreigners buying homes to get citizenship (a "golden passport"), and foreigners trying to spend their unlaundered fortunes abroad.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
I have to ask, why did you create a website analytics company? It seems extremely commoditized at this point with multiple competitors who have strong positioning (I.e. privacy focused, open source, etc).
gjvnq 6y ago
Why not use some sort of fauxopen license? Let anyone read the code and run it but only for testing and hobby purposes. This would be like offering a trial version with the advantage that people can easily offer tiny fixes and letting people make changes for their particular use cases.
- KajMagnus 6y ago
  Check out the Business Source License: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/, and maybe: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroach... "Why We're Relicensing CockroachDB [under the Business Source License]" Also, the Fair Source license: https://fair.io https://fair.io
m3nu 6y ago
> nothing makes people disappear faster from a GitHub thread than asking them if they want to contribute the code changes themselves. Sad, but true. Everyone wants good software but very few users are willing to contribute anything. Even if it's just to test an unreleased version. I think open source projects need to think more about their "funnel" that turns users into contributors. Even if it's just for minor tasks, like docs, translation or testing.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
From what I can see businesses either need OSS to attract / retain developers and put someone to maintain their OSS projects or they just equate OSS with abandonware that has a chance to make us look cool. Don't get me wrong, having companies do OSS is much better than having unpaid developers ruining their sleep and coding 4 more hours after their daily shift. Still, I don't think it's a great reason to not do OSS. I can name soo many projects open sourced by companies where nobody bothered to merge my PRs or answer issues. The reason I wouldn't open source my business is for a later stage, when I actually have a profitable business and AWS/other giants will clone it and sell it instead of me.
wpietri 6y ago
Good stuff! A software business is a business first. But for engineers, it's easy to think software is the most important part.

193 points by amzans 6y ago

I don't think the author made a compelling argument as to why open-sourcing his code led to the problems he describes. It sounds like having the code open sourced took too much of his time away since it allowed people to make requests for things. But I don't see why that means he necessarily has to take time to fulfill the requests. Sounds like he was too focused in one area of his project, and needed to take a step back to get a broader view of the state of things. I'm not convinced the closed/open source nature of his code is responsible for that.

mooreds 6y ago
I think his point was that folks who participate in open source have higher demands for changes and support. If a business is pure SaaS only with no open source code behind it, there is less interaction in general. I'm sure there's still support tickets and whatnot, but there's not the same level of "please fix this" requests. People just move on from commercial packages if they don't do what they need, in my experience. From the post: > In the past, when it came to running a business as a solo-founder, having it open source created too much maintenance burden for very specific feature requests. In particular from non-paying users, who sometimes sent me emails directly, demanding I look at their issue, or help them fix things “as soon as possible”. This lack of interaction is both a feature (lets you focus, you have time to take care of paying users) and a bug (less interaction means you could build the wrong thing, the source is no longer a marketing mechanism for you).
- Jaygles 6y ago
  Right, I agree with you, but as I said > It sounds like having the code open sourced took too much of his time away since it allowed people to make requests for things. But I don't see why that means he necessarily has to take time to fulfill the requests. The existence of the interactions doesn't necessitate engaging with them. If engaging with interactions is taking too much time away, one could simply, not engage with them.
  - mooreds 6y ago
    > The existence of the interactions doesn't necessitate engaging with them. If engaging with interactions is taking too much time away, one could simply, not engage with them. Sure, I get it, everyone needs to prioritize. But if you are ignoring interactions on your OSS project, you can expect more, oh, I'll call it 'heat'. I have seen those github issue threads, where people get frustrated because someone hasn't engaged. So if you aren't going to engage, why open source it? Sure, there are other reasons, but the community feedback loop is a crucial part of the value of OSS for building a business. Also, I get there's nuance and you can choose to engage when there's been a certain level of commitment from the community (a number of upvotes is what my current company uses to help prioritize efforts), but for a solo founder it can be really hard to prioritize, and the author apparently found all the requests a distraction. His choice, but I sympathize.
    - Jaygles 6y ago
      There's certainly value in engaging with the community through the open sourced code. In the end its all a balancing act and getting it right is the hard part. I'm not trying to claim to know how much effort should be going in each aspect. If I did, I'd be running a successful business right about now.
    - bachmeier 6y ago
      > Sure, I get it, everyone needs to prioritize. But if you are ignoring interactions on your OSS project, you can expect more, oh, I'll call it 'heat'. I have seen those github issue threads, where people get frustrated because someone hasn't engaged. Companies selling non-OSS products get slammed with requests on a large scale and they have to deal with them somehow. Todoist immediately comes to mind. I mean, sure, it's possible that some users of a paid product will conclude you don't know what you're doing and take their business elsewhere, but that's kind of like boasting about fixing your broken finger by cutting off your arm.
      - brobdingnagians 6y ago
        I think the key thing is whether the people making the feature requests are paying you. We get feature requests all the time, but they are the people paying us thousands of dollars, so those take priority. If they aren't, or it doesn't appear that anyone else paying us will use it, then they shouldn't take priority. This is a way of whittling down what is really valuable to people, rather than just they took long enough to write an email about a cool thing they really think you should do.
serial_dev 6y ago
Exactly, I think people misunderstand what open source means. Open source doesn't mean that you need to provide hours of free support to someone who couldn't even bother to write a proper issue description. For a matter of fact, you don't even need to provide free support to anyone, no matter how nice they are and no matter how well they written the issue You can help them, but you don't have to. You also don't need to accept pull requests: if you think that the feature doesn't make sense or the code quality is terrible, or it's just not important to you, you don't need to accept pull requests. You also don't need to bend over backwards to maintain a stabile API. It makes your life easier if you communicate this in the README of the package, tell people that it's the early days of the product, you develop in the open, but you aren't going to abide by other people's unrealistic expectations about your open source work.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  >Exactly, I think people misunderstand what open source means. "Misunderstand" implies there's some authoritative definition on "open source" means here. I remember people considering Dasura "not open source" even though it was GPLv2, simply because they didn't accept patches and only threw code over the wall. To a lot of people, open source means engaging on Github. You can say "they're wrong", but that's just disagreement.
- ipaddr 6y ago
  I find just throwing code into github is my perfect level of open sourcing. It's public and I can pull the code into any project. No pesky user requests or stars. Accepting pull requests on smaller projects seems strange. If I wrote this why do I want someone else sharing credit.
j_san 6y ago
While it's technically not open-sourcing code itself it's human nature in my opinion. As a founder you want to support and don't upset your customers, even if they are using the free version of your product. Yes, you could simply not fulfill these requests or not help these customers, but I think for most people it will still introduce stress. There may be people who can deal easily with this, but I think it's natural to be stressed by this and run after things that you shouldn't. Still I agree that it's probably possible to open-source without these problems and that this is not a complete compelling argument for every case. For me personally at least not open-sourcing at the beginning (like the author did) would probably be preferred as well for a solo-founded project.
- KajMagnus 6y ago
  > I think for most people it will still introduce stress [... ] run after things that you shouldn't. I think so too. There's personality trait that I wonder if it is related to this: Agreeable vs Assertive, in the Big 5 personality traits, (Actually I wrote a sibling reply (sibling to yours) and mentioned this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26433328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26433328 hmm maybe it'd been better if I had replied to you instead :- ) didn't see your reply until now though.)
jandrewrogers 6y ago
My experience is strongly aligned with the author's. There is a substantial real-world overhead associated with open sourcing code, all other things being equal. This overhead is imposed on you whether you want it or not. If you are operating in a resource constrained environment, like the author, then not open sourcing is a sensible cost containment measure. Open sourcing code is a luxury for those with ample time or money. I have code I could open source (e.g. some very useful Postgres extensions created for a company) but I value my time more, and I know many others that view the calculus similarly. There is value in open sourcing code but we should be honest about the associated costs and not pretend they don't exist.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  I'd tend to agree for a small package. But, this was a company with a community (according to author). Pointing requests to the paid support page would turn lemons into lemonade. We can only speculate why this didn't happen.
- 3np 6y ago
  Shat kind of overhead do you mean, exactly? You could just push it to a public repo on GH/GL/whatever, and then choose your own level of involvement? You don’t have to engage or even provide a means of contact.
  - mkj 6y ago
    Github doesn't allow disabling pull requests, so there's always that means of contact.
    - 3np 6y ago
      Right, I think this can be done in GitLab though, if one doesn't want to self-host?
KajMagnus 6y ago
> I'm not convinced the closed/open source nature of his code is responsible for that Could that depend on the personality traits of the solo founder? What if it's in some people's nature, to feel bad about rejecting make-sense feature request and bug fixes, in order to instead focus on money making things? (Even if logically it'd be the long term good thing to do.) Whilst someone else might have felt just fine, doing that? If you know about the Big 5 personality traits, maybe this is related to where you are, in the Agreeable vs Assertive dimension. For someone who is more Agreeable, then, keeping the SaaS closed source, might be the way to go — so there simply won't be any unsupported platform installation problems to ignore but feel bad about.

marvinblum 6y ago

A few months ago, I've started a similar analytics project [0], which I have now turned into a product [1] together with my co-founder. The difference to Panelbear is, that I've started this to be used on my personal website, so it was open-source right from the beginning and without the intention to make money. In fact, you can still use our core library for free (AGPL licensed). When we looked at the other solutions out there, we saw that a lot of them offer a self-hosted version for free. Giving away whole products for free has become a trend I don't anticipate. You can be sure there is an open-source, free as in free beer replacement for almost anything, which makes it really hard to build a sustainable business. While you can generate some traction off of it, you also have to deal with people asking for free support, new features, bug fixes, and so on. I have quite a lot of open-source projects, one of them is a game server management web UI [2]. It breaks my heard every time I have to tell someone that I can't support their request. There are cases where it makes sense to have the product fully open-source of course, like an operating system, or anything that can be considered "infrastructure". Writing software is difficult and it takes countless hours to build something useful that is non-trivial. If it's something a lot of people rely on, think about charging for it, instead of giving it away for free. But in the end it's your time after all. [0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch [1] https://pirsch.io/ https://pirsch.io/ [2] https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb

jokethrowaway 6y ago
Free offerings are a great way to stifle competition. When it's coming from OSS developers who are not making money themselves, it's indeed head scratching.

vemv 6y ago

How about: business logic is and remains private, but support libraries, boilerplate, etc is offered as discrete OSS repositories. This isn't too fancy - quite commonly corps and startups alike offer some generic libraries. One can take that pattern to greater degrees. This allows to scratch the itch of sharing something with the community, while still guaranteeing a livelihood. Of course, it's mostly an incompatible approach for those favoring a strict monorepo- and microservice-based architecture.

marvinblum 6y ago
Agreed. If it's something that has no business value in itself and can be adopted by others (which might contribute in return), open-source it. There are also half-open/open-core models, see my comment below.
mooreds 6y ago
We do this with a lot of our stuff at my current employer. It's a good compromise in my experience.
zomglings 6y ago
git submodules, despite their warts, do help incorporate a bunch of distinct code bases into a monorepo.
- vemv 6y ago
  That might be also considered a multirepo in disguise :)
  - zomglings 6y ago
    Haha - you are right, and it is why git submodules have warts. One thing I will say for them - at least you know explicitly which commits of your dependencies you are using.
mattbuilds 6y ago
I have a similar plan with my current project [0] of interactive coding docs. The library to build the docs would be OSS. So anyone could build it and use it in their projects, But the business of hosting courses, payment, an advanced UI for building the docs would all be a SaaS. I think it's a nice balance that gives you the best of both worlds. [0] https://devbyexample.com https://devbyexample.com

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

I once thought that the worst in opensource are forum people (later replaced by GitHub people) who demand premium service when they encounter a bug. But then I learned that the worst in opensource are users with access to reviews with rating: I give you 1/5 because the app doesn't do what I want and you don't kiss my ass nice enough. You don't know how to treat your customers right, how childish of you to ask money to fix my particular problem!! For some reason a lot of people believe that leaving a review with bad rating for a free and opensource app will motivate the developers fix the issue asap, in hope that the user will change the rating to 2/5.

hydroxideOH- 6y ago
This is what happens with my open source Chrome extension's reviews on the Chrome Web Store. Not that you can really make money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  > Not that you can really make money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life. Why not? There's successful projects selling or based around extensions.
- Glench 6y ago
  Heh, it is totally possible to make money off extensions. You just need to provide value. Here are some examples: - $100k with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/css-scan-made-over-100k-d6d2146f11 https://www.indiehackers.com/post/css-scan-made-over-100k-d6... - $38k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/187-jordan-oconnor-of-closet-tools https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/187-jordan-oconnor-of-c... - $3.1k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/night-eye https://www.indiehackers.com/product/night-eye - $2.5k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/weather-extension-ad9b94660e https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/weather-extension-ad9...
  - 6y ago

sylvain_kerkour 6y ago

Very good read, Thanks!

candiddevmike 6y ago

I came to a similar junction with my app. It's B2C SaaS, and I bluntly want to earn money for all the years I put into it. I chose to add a free tier and self hosting as a compromise. In the future, I would love to open source it. But for now, all I see in other B2C/consumer OSS projects is a lot of complaining, frustration, and extra work without a benefit to my paying customers.

mattkrick 6y ago

I built an open-source B2B SaaS that recently raised its Series A. While I'm not a solo founder, we were a team of 3 up until we raised our seed. The difference I see is traduora looks like a project, not a company. Sell support! Don't give it away for free. If someone asks me for a bugfix, I show them the ticket in our open backlog & tell them if they want it done faster, they have to pay. Seeing their concern turned in to a ticket shows them that I care, but telling them I prioritize paid fixes tells them it's not a charity. Don't let them feel entitled.

jandrese 6y ago
If they opt to not pay do you leave the bug in your system forever? I've always been a little annoyed at this model, because with so many companies it comes down to "I paid you $120,000/year for this support contract and you're telling me you've been able to track down this bug I reported, but you're not going to fix it because it's not on the project your developers are currently working on." And then they get really miffed if you drop the support contract next year, telling us how we'll be locked out of security and feature updates, even though there were zero releases in the past calendar year. If I'm playing for the equivalent of a full time junior developer I expect at least some action on my bug reports.
- gcheong 6y ago
  If they opt not to pay then the bug gets fixed according to severity and priority in the regular development cycles. It's possible it will never get fixed. I see your point with paid support contracts that don't give you anything, and you would be justified to cut your losses, but I think this was more specific to individual bugs that a company wants to up the priority for.
- thayne 6y ago
  They way I wish it worked, although I haven't seen it really successfully implemtented is that instead of paying for a support contract, you could pay for support in a more a la carte manner. Such as say, pledging money to a bug or feature, and the dev team prioritizes based on how much money is pledged for different features and bugs, perhaps with some expiration so customers don't end up paying for a bug that isn't fixed until years later when it no longer matters.

kureikain 6y ago

I used to swear by Open Source try to build an uptime monitoring but failed https://github.com/yeo/notyim https://github.com/yeo/notyim and a few other thing. Eventually one day I want to do email forwarding, I was thinking open source or not and pretty much chooese to go with close-source for now. I can see myself open source in the future when I get enough customers and I have more time to cleanup the private stuff in our mono repository right now. But for an early self-bootstrap self-funded I feel like focus too much on Open Source and I don't have time to focus on the growth or marketing. I finally release my first SaaS this year, make $78/month right now(don't laugh at me). https://hanami.run https://hanami.run I would say I'm not against opensource and it definetely work for others, but for me, by not going open source I can focus on the business itself. With that being, I contributed back such as a mail parser https://github.com/yeo/parsemail https://github.com/yeo/parsemail https://github.com/yeo/pix https://github.com/yeo/pix I can imagine myself release a lite-version(our early prototype) where we can forward email using a config file, instead of a database with all the user, membership stuff that no one care about if you want to self-hosted my SaaS.

StavrosK 6y ago

This is semi off topic, but the sentence "housing in Munich has gone insane" struck me. Housing in my city in Greece has gone crazy too, a two-bedroom apartment costs significantly more than minimum wage, and I don't know who can afford to stay there. Does anyone why housing everywhere seems to be going nuts? This can't be a good sign.

sofixa 6y ago
> Does anyone why housing everywhere seems to be going nuts? This can't be a good sign. It will depend on the location, but usually a mix of more people in the big cities, inflation, low interest rates ( so low mortgage rates), physical constraints ( most cities can't sprawl forever), sometimes regulations ( like zoning). It's mostly in big cities though, go to a small one without any obvious geographic advantage ( like being on the seaside), and prices are usually much lower and stagnating. Also depending on location, IMHO the pandemic has shown to a lot of people that remote work is possible and can be productive, so there will be some moves towards smaller cities and villages + remote working for big city businesses.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  That makes sense, thanks. I expected prices in the big city to drop too in the pandemic (at least because of a drop in tourism), but, if anything, they've gone up...
mixmastamyk 6y ago
This is how it happens in California, do many of these happen in Europe? - Populations are growing. - Younger folks would rather live in the city. - Sets of homeowners and voters heavily overlap. - Government supports homeowners via tax policy, all housing is already taken. - Existing homeowners prevent new construction. - Some portion of renters enjoying rent control also support NIMBY policies. A perfect recipe for housing scarcity and therefore high prices.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  If anything, populations here are declining, the set of voters is basically "everyone", or near enough, owning a home isn't particularly supported? Though not discouraged either, there is quite a bit of new construction, but on the outskirts of the city (as happens usually), and there are no rent-control policies. This is why I'm mystified as to what's driving prices up, I've heard things like increasing tourism making owning a home a good investment, foreigners buying homes to get citizenship (a "golden passport"), and foreigners trying to spend their unlaundered fortunes abroad.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

I have to ask, why did you create a website analytics company? It seems extremely commoditized at this point with multiple competitors who have strong positioning (I.e. privacy focused, open source, etc).

gjvnq 6y ago

Why not use some sort of fauxopen license? Let anyone read the code and run it but only for testing and hobby purposes. This would be like offering a trial version with the advantage that people can easily offer tiny fixes and letting people make changes for their particular use cases.

KajMagnus 6y ago
Check out the Business Source License: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/ https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/, and maybe: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroachdb/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroach... "Why We're Relicensing CockroachDB [under the Business Source License]" Also, the Fair Source license: https://fair.io https://fair.io

m3nu 6y ago

> nothing makes people disappear faster from a GitHub thread than asking them if they want to contribute the code changes themselves. Sad, but true. Everyone wants good software but very few users are willing to contribute anything. Even if it's just to test an unreleased version. I think open source projects need to think more about their "funnel" that turns users into contributors. Even if it's just for minor tasks, like docs, translation or testing.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

From what I can see businesses either need OSS to attract / retain developers and put someone to maintain their OSS projects or they just equate OSS with abandonware that has a chance to make us look cool. Don't get me wrong, having companies do OSS is much better than having unpaid developers ruining their sleep and coding 4 more hours after their daily shift. Still, I don't think it's a great reason to not do OSS. I can name soo many projects open sourced by companies where nobody bothered to merge my PRs or answer issues. The reason I wouldn't open source my business is for a later stage, when I actually have a profitable business and AWS/other giants will clone it and sell it instead of me.

wpietri 6y ago

Good stuff! A software business is a business first. But for engineers, it's easy to think software is the most important part.