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Ask HN: Can you sell an open source app as a service?
Hi all,
I'm in the early stages of developing a language learning application and would like to keep it open source. The current plan is to develop it as an open-source web application under a non-profit organization, and sell it as a service, but also accept donations. Does this make any sense as a business model, or am I going about this all wrong? Any suggestions? Thanks!
- flaque 4y agoWhatever pays for you to eat and maintain the project affects and determines the product, regardless of whether it's non-profit or for-profit, open-source or closed-source, donations or subscriptions. If your product survives on donations, your customers are your donors, and your product is getting them to give you donations. If your product survives on subscriptions, your customers are your customers, and your product is ensuring they continue to use and find value in the product and don't unsubscribe. I might consider picking one, at first, instead of doing both. Otherwise you end up needing to build two products instead of one.
- silent_cal 4y agoThanks for your advice. Do you think it's feasible to sell an open-source product as a subscription, though?
- flaque 4y agoOf course, we did (with a consumer mobile app) for a long time. So does sentry and posthog.
- PaulHoule 4y agowordpress.com?
- getflookup 4y agoYou should look at these 3 projects for inspiration: + Plausible Analytics + fullPage.js + Dracula Theme Their respective founders are also reachable (I think) and they have built very successful projects based on the Open Source model.
- silent_cal 4y agoAwesome, thanks!