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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 Panelb
by 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 agoFree 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.