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Ask HN: How big does an open-source project need to be for a lifestyle business?

• andrea_s 11y ago
  Making money with software is not very correlated with said software's quality - or popularity. I think yours is an unanswerable question, you should probably start from the other side of the equation (i.e. what's the target marget? who would be willing to pay for the software? and, given that we are talking about open source, what would you sell - and to whom - to beat the possibility to just use it? What would the licensing options for commercial usage look like?).
• currentoor 11y ago
  It really depends on what the software does. I've mostly seen people make money off of their open source software by consulting for companies that use it. For example, I know a couple companies paid the creator of core.typed to develop it further. But those were one off gigs, not recurring revenue.
• rawnlq 11y ago
  What's your "good way to monetize it"? The typical approach I have seen is selling support (paid custom features or forks) but that doesn't scale well. You'll basically be a freelancer specializing in the project you wrote.
  • jnbiche 11y ago
    Selling related software that works in a different environment (say, mobile, or resource-constrained, or a different OS). Yeah, I've already done your second approach, that's not what I'm hoping for (which may prove elusive).
  • timharding 11y ago
    Note that he wants to create a lifestyle business, not a startup. Not sure how important scalability is for that.
• onion2k 11y ago
  If the project is popular because it's a free alternative to something that costs then I imagine charging would kill it completely.
• gavinballard 11y ago
  Mike Perham has done a great job of turning two successful open source projects (Sidekiq and Inspeqtor) into successful businesses. If you're interested, I recommend listening to his interviews on the ChangeLog Podcast (https://changelog.com/159/ https://changelog.com/159/, https://changelog.com/130/ https://changelog.com/130/, https://changelog.com/92/ https://changelog.com/92/) where he talks about how he monetised those products. I'm pretty sure that succeeding in this is not going to be a matter of how many "stars" your project has, but rather a function of the dollar value of the problem your software solves and how well you market the paid product. You should start that marketing now by providing a link to your project :).
  • jnbiche 11y ago
    Thanks for the excellent resources, I'll look that up. > You should start that marketing now by providing a link to your project :). Well, I haven't even created the paid product at this point, it's still early in the game. Just trying to get a feel for the potentials.
    • gavinballard 11y ago
      > Thanks for the excellent resources, I'll look that up. You're welcome! > Well, I haven't even created the paid product at this point, it's still early in the game. Just trying to get a feel for the potentials. Sure, but you're at the top of Hacker News right now and there's zero downside (and lots of upside) in getting your project in front of a bunch of developers. Even if they don't start using it right away, maybe it will stick in their minds and then six months down the track (when you do have a paid version) they'll Google it.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • mkarklins 11y ago
    Thanks, didn't even know about Inspeqtor.
  • mperham 11y ago
• jbrooksuk 11y ago
  In regards to the GitHub stars, I don't think that a high amount of stars actually correlates to the amount of people using the repository. Cachet (https://github.com/cachethq/cachet https://github.com/cachethq/cachet) has 2.6k stars but I know that the amount of installs is actually far higher.
  • jnbiche 11y ago
    Fair enough, and to be clear, I'm nowhere near 2.6k stars, although the project has grown quickly with no promotion. The only reason I pulled that particular indicator out of the hat was to provide some reasonable benchmark for comparison. But perhaps it was not a reasonable benchmark, after all.
    • e12e 11y ago
      I would think merged pull-request (aka community patches that doesn't suck) would be a better indicator on gh - at least for open source project. Fixed issues a close second.
      • jnbiche 11y ago
        Linux and LLVM have no merged pull requests on Github. And a lot of these "Awesome x" (Node.js, Rust, Go, React, etc) will merge just about anything. Also, I know of several project that fix tons of issues, but are relatively unpopular (perhaps because they have so many issues?). I think the bottom line is there are no perfect indicators of open source project popularity.
        • e12e 11y ago
          Linux has lots of merged patches though. That they don't have merged prs isn't surprising as they handle patches via email.
  • SwellJoe 11y ago
    Our project has 295 stars and 1+ million installs. Stars is definitely not a reliable indicator.
• roel_v 11y ago
  Pipe dream. a) 100k / year is not 'reasonable', it's huge in microisv terms. The modal revenue for independent software vendors is $0 (stats from payment processors). To get there in 2 years is even less common. b) The number of 'stars' has correlation r=0 with ability to monetize. I'd even speculate - the more stars, the more ingrained in people's heads it is 'this is open source, ergo free', the harder it will be to make money. If you're selling support for something only slightly popular, customers will have no other options - but on support for Wordpress, you have to compete with other devs, with 2$/hour rentacoder people, with Amazon selling 'teach yourself Wordpress in 60 minutes' books etc. c) What incentive do companies have to pay for it? You have to be able to articulate it clearly before going down this path. Your wording makes me think you are thinking 'this is my secret sauce, I can't give it away', which is (frankly) very naive. If your idea is even a little bit good, you'll have to stuff it down people's throats to accept it. I don't know of any business that makes money OS software (on the software itself, not the consultancy around it) without having a dual licensing model - GPL or commercial. And if that was really a cash cow, Trolltech wouldn't have been sold a dozen times (or so) over the last 10 years... To judge whether your product has commercial potential, you need to 1) Describe your customers. In detail. Not just 'anyone using a database', but 'medium scale accounting businesses with on-premises case database' (idiotic example, of course). You need to do this in such a way that you can derive a strategy from it on how to find them. E.g., accountants meet at industry events, where you could book a booth. 2) Identify a sample of, say, 100 of them, using the methods from step 1. 3) Start calling them. Preferably after you've taken a sales class (just 2 days will give you life changing insights, I promise). Not emailing, actually talking to people. For the 100 from step 2, identify how many would buy your product. 4) Get sales promises, 10 or 15 or so. People who you can excite so much about your product that they promise (informally) 'yes, I'll buy this if you offer it within 6 months' or whatever. 5) If you can't even do this, you have no (OK, 'barely any') hope of succeeding. The main skill you need is marketing to succeed at an endeavor like this. The quality of your software, or its popularity amongst the crowd that uses Github, is of secondary importance at best. That's not to say that you can succeed with selling people crap product, snakeoil style, just that your life as a software vendor is 10 or 20% of software development, at best (or worst, depending on your perspective...)
  • 11y ago
• bestan 11y ago
  Yes, it is definitely realistic. We've seen several projects like Sidekiq (http://sidekiq.org/ http://sidekiq.org/) that did it. Another quantitative indicator you can use is number of downloads on relevant package manager (npm, PyPi etc.). These indicators only tell you how big your audience is and not whether your project could provide income. However, having big audience increase chances of success - you have a good position here. Check out MinoHubs (https://www.minohubs.com https://www.minohubs.com). We provide tools that will help you get started with monetizing your project in several ways very quickly. Let us know if you have any questions or if you're missing anything.
• jmadsen 11y ago
  There are a few podcasts that have discussed this. Typically it is done via support for existing OSS, offered to companies who need to be able to depend on full knowledge & stability of that code. A couple of examples: 1) Redhat 2) "some guy" from one of the podcasts I can't think of at the moment who forks Ruby and keeps a stable, supported version for his corporate clients, while dealing with patches & upgrades on his own to his fork In both of these cases, you can see that is isn't actually "how many users", but "how many corporate users who need a service that keeps software X completely stable and managed" So I think from what you've said that it would be a good thing to look into. You may want to contact the guys from http://www.tropicalmba.com/ http://www.tropicalmba.com/ for a few pointers - this is right up their ally and they are very willing to discuss
  • gavinballard 11y ago
    RailsLTS (https://railslts.com/ https://railslts.com/) is probably the product you're referring to in (2).
• ledlauzis 11y ago
  You can turn everything into a business as long as you have a reasonable business plan in place and know that users are willing to pay for some extra features or service. Story time: 2 years ago I started to learn frontend web development from various online courses. I had zero technical background and no intention to make money. Within few months I learned enough to create my first WordPress theme. It was terrible but it worked . I made few more themes and never did anything with them. I made like 6 themes and just deleted theme few months down the road. Then I decided to submit one theme on WordPress.org just to see if it gets approved. Themes goes through review and someone would evaluate my code and that's what I was after. Long story short my themes now have been downloaded over 1,000,000 times and I have turned it into 6 figure a year business. While I haven't sold a single theme yet, apparently you can recommend hosting and premium plugins that goes along with your themes and make a decent income. For those interested you can visit site at: https://colorlib.com/ https://colorlib.com/
  • tylercubell 11y ago
    > I have turned it into 6 figure a year business. > While I haven't sold a single theme yet What?
    • andrea_s 11y ago
      sponsorships
    • jnbiche 11y ago
      He has very popular themes that he gives away, and then advertises for paid products on his theme's download pages (presumably).
    • Radle 11y ago
      As he said, he finances via direct advertisement. Not by selling products, but by recommending additional features.
    • Radle 11y ago
      As he said, he finances via direct advertisement. Not by selling products, but by recommending additional features.
• SwellJoe 11y ago
  I've got one data point for you, though I don't think you can guesstimate income based merely on one factor, especially not github stars (we only have 295). My company is based on Open Source software (Webmin, Virtualmin, Cloudmin, and Usermin), and it sounds sort of similar to your situation. When we started the company based on this stuff we had several major companies in our target market (and we chose our target market, and chose to focus on Virtualmin rather than other features of Webmin, because that market already knew us and used our software in visible ways) using at least one of our projects, almost a million downloads a year, and my co-founder and I had both been making a decent living doing contract work based on it and writing about it. Today, Webmin has about 1 million installations worldwide (and has grown to ~3.5 million downloads per year). We make enough money from our small proprietary extensions to Virtualmin and Cloudmin to support three modest salaries. It is not $100k/year for any of the three people working on it, though it's not an outrageous dream to think we could get there..we've had much better years than we're having this year or last year, however, so revenue is not necessarily growing like gangbusters, despite our userbase roughly tripling in the time the company has existed and still growing at a comfortable clip annually. Ours is sort of an open core model, though the core is very large (~500kloc) and the proprietary bits are very small (~20kloc), which may be part of our revenue problem. I think there are some things you're probably underestimating (not to say it should discourage you, I'm just trying to open your eyes to some challenges you will face that you might not expect): When you sell Open Source software, support is your biggest value add, even if you don't want to be a support company. Support costs a lot of time and money to do well. Time and money has to be balanced between making things better and supporting existing users on the current version (true of proprietary as well, but proprietary vendors don't have a million people using the free version and expecting help). Growing the free user base (which can be a side effect of having people working full-time on it) can paradoxically lead to less time and money for making the software better. We fight this battle all the time. To make our current customers and OSS users exceedingly happy with our level of support is to severely limit our ability to deliver next generation solutions. We run on such a shoe-string, and compete with such huge players, that it's always a struggle to deliver both (and we fail plenty). So, plan to hire someone to help you support the software, eventually. If we were comfortable leaving our forums to "the community" and not bothering to have an official company voice present every day helping answer the hard questions, we could increase our own salaries by a lot (we pay our support guy more than we pay ourselves), but I don't know that we'd continue to see the growth we've seen in our user base, which we also value. We make things because we want them to be used, not just because we want to make money. Get used to having demands thrown at you every day. The level of documentation and completeness and rapidity of development expected of a product is vastly different than that of an Open Source project, or at least the way you have to respond to it is different...even for users of the Open Source versions. We have over 1,000 printed pages worth of documentation, plus a couple hundred pages of online help, and still get complaints about our documentation regularly. And, we have more "features" than any other product in our space, including the two big proprietary competitors, and yet still get feature requests all the time (and it's harder to say no than to just implement it, which can hurt usability). A million users generates a lot of feedback. It's a very high volume of demands to answer to. Ignoring them pisses people off, saying no pisses people off, and saying yes often risks making the product worse or more complex for the average user, hurting long-term growth. Even saying, "Not right now" pisses people off. You're going to piss a lot of people off, even if you're just trying to make the best software you can and make a decent living. I think what I'm trying to say is, think about it for a while before committing to your plans. If you currently have steady income, hang on to it while you sort out a few details. Try to firm up what your users would pay for your value add. Try to figure out how many of your users would pay for your value add. The only sure way to do this is to actually have users pay you something for your value add. Try to figure out how you will automate support (hint: You can't, because automated support almost always sucks; even Google has awful automated support, and they're good at almost everything.) At least figure out how you will streamline it and offload it; have an active forum already? If not, get one. Have a community of people talking about your software already? Get one. If Open Source based business were a Pokemon, community would be its special ability. So, you should start cultivating that now, even before money is coming in.
• karterk 11y ago
  You would never know unless you started exploring. Stars have nothing to do with revenue - it's purely a function of how much value you can add to the enterprise. Basically, you have to demonstrate quantitatively that you can charge $X to help them save $Y where Y >> X. Here's what I would suggest. Reach out to a few people from these organizations and ask them for their general views on your project and what their major pain points are. I'm sure they will be more than happy to talk to you about it if they're indeed already deriving great value from it. Once you have established a good rapport (i.e. warming up the lead), set-up a call with them to pitch your vision for the paid product. A call is crucial because email and text can only communicate so much - you can get a far better idea of their domain and problems through a quick 45 min call. Scheduling this should not be a major problem once you have established a good email channel previously. If you can get about 8-10 people interested in exploring your paid offering you have something that's promising. After that you can think about scaling the business with self-service etc.
  • jnbiche 11y ago
    I hate phone calls, but I suspect you're right about this. But calling potential customers is definitely concrete advice I can do. BTW, everyone discounts Github stars, but the one thing stars gives me is a very easy-to-access list of potential customers.
    • tomcam 11y ago
      Great attitude! Making these phone calls is like building up a muscle. It will become easier, I promise. And I think you'll be surprised at how pleasant many of them will be. My best to you.
• fragmede 11y ago
  Yeah, so looking at the GitHub Cabal's secret price list, 25,000 GH stars will put you at $102k / yr, so shoot for that. Seriously though, the fact that you're asking about GitHub stars is... telling. There's plenty of popular repo's on GitHub that I'd refuse to pay any money to, but more to the point, GitHub is a terrible customer experience because it's not for selling software to people, thus the only thing 'GH stars' tells us is... the number of people that have starred a particular repo. For a purely open-source project, look at OpenSSL. It's probably in production in a significant amount of the entire internet. But until Heartbleed came along and it came to light that the OpenSSL project was severely underfunded, it was limping along with little sponsorship. Red Hat is probably the most famous open source business, but unfortunately, if you look at their practices, they're abiding by the letter of the GPL, but not entirely the spirit, which they've decided is necessary from a business perspective, so if you're looking to make a lifestyle business based on your open-source project, the question to you is: how comfortable would you be with a lifestyle business based on an entirely proprietary project? Is this a pipe dream? Chances are, yeah. But do dreams come true? Sometimes :)
  • jnbiche 11y ago
    I now regret choosing to bring up GH stars (was just grasping for some concrete indicator). I was more trying to start a conversation, which succeeded.
• gizmo 11y ago
  It's completely feasible, but you're playing on hard mode when you keep the software open source. If you've got good business sense and are willing to hustle you'll find a way to succeed. If your only strong suit is software, however, you're setting yourself up for failure. Would you rather make $300k a year writing and selling proprietary software or fail/make $20k a year providing value-added services for an open-source project? This isn't a tough choice for me, but for some people the ideal of open source trumps all. It's much easier to write software that fits a simple business model, than to figure out how to shoehorn a business model onto an open source project. You can tell which route is the pragmatic one: start from scratch, optimize for easy monetization. That said, don't let any of this discourage you. It's absolutely possible to create a cool lifestyle business based on an open source project (or anything really). The only way to know if you can do this is to seriously commit to it. If you don't have to support a family it's probably a risk you can take.
  • jnbiche 11y ago
    Thank you for your input, it's sobering, yet encouraging :). > It's much easier to write software that fits a simple business model Everyone talks about this, but how do I find this business model? Is there some methodical way to uncover needed software? I mean, everyone talks about having industry expertise, but I actually do have industry expertise in a non-software-related industry (I only returned to software development after a 10+ year hiatus). But my industry expertise is worthless for this particular task, since this industry is absolutely flooded with software, mostly low quality but also some high quality stuff. The last thing people in the industry need is another software package (and they even say this). So how do I find these vaunted "business models" for paid software?
    • gizmo 11y ago
      A business model isn't a unicorn. Your business model doesn't need to be unique or even different. To the contrary: just do what's known to work! 90% of software companies have the following business model: * create proprietary software * charge money for licences * charge extra for support * charge extra for updates * pay through the nose for enterprise options 90% of saas companies work like this: * create proprietary software * offer a free trial * charge money for it every month * (optional) pay through the nose for enterprise options It's just that simple. No need to overthink it. Having industry expertise just makes it easier to get to product-market fit. It's by no means a requirement. You may be undervaluing your industry experience. Unless your market knowledge is really generic (e.g. webshops), you've probably got some valuable insights. (edit: most programmers get paid well, therefore, if you become a programmer you're likely to get paid well. If there are a lot of companies making money in a market, then you're likely to make a lot of money if you enter that market. Inversely, if everybody in a market is struggling [indie games] then you're likely to struggle too.)
• raverbashing 11y ago
  Does your landlord or local supermarket accept stars on github as payment? There's your answer You need to provide a service connected to your project, this is regardless of how many people use your project.
  • briandear 11y ago
    My local supermarket does! It's called GitPay. I just provide my github username at checkout and they deduct starts from my repositories. The exchange rate is roughly 10 euro per 26.2 stars. I generally get better rates at the bank by the convenience of GitPay has made it hard to resist.
• josscrowcroft 11y ago
  I created Open Exchange Rates[0] as an open source project four years ago, publishing free currency data into a GitHub repository. It was launched alongside money.js[1] (a minimal JavaScript currency conversion library), designed to work seamlessly together and both found a brilliant response and grew an organic community. Hundreds of tutorials and thousands of posts and mentions later, GitHub eventually contacted me and politely asked me to take down the exchange rates repository, because they were being hammered by people requesting the data - only at this point did it occur to me that I'd created something of genuine value, and (6 months of fretting and tail-chasing later) I opened up a paid option. For me the key thing was: I never intended to create a business. It was (and is) a labour of love. We've since grown to be the industry-leader for our area - "good enough data" for the startup and SME market - and count Etsy, KickStarter, WordPress and Lonely Planet among our clients. Although it's no longer truly open source, 98% of our users are still on the Free plan, which will very soon be expanding to include all features (so, no more limiting by price tiers) - this is how I still feel so passionate about it. I can't wait to publish the next steps in our journey - where we're opening everything up to the community and marketplace. I don't like where the industry is heading (competitive, closed, secretive) and we've chosen to move towards transparency and sharing. I like businesses built on a core of open source community, because they're in service to the people who are actually building the products, rather than those in the traditional 'upper levels'. This means there's really no "sales process" (which I'm massively allergic to) - apart from the occasional grilling from the accounting department, who may find it hard to trust a business based on open source principles. Good luck! [0] https://openexchangerates.org https://openexchangerates.org [1] https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js
  • jakobegger 11y ago
    I'd like to thank you for creating your API, and for the generous terms on the free plan. I'm using your API to estimate my weekly revenue (internal reporting). A suggestion: It would be awesome if it was possible to download historic data in batch format (eg. CSV) which would make it easy to copy the data into my reporting database. When I started working on my own reporting solution, I'd have paid $100 just to download a CSV file with 5 years of exchange rates, even though the data is available for free on a bunch of websites, since it's such a hassle to collect.
• jakobegger 11y ago
  As others have said, the number of stars is irrelevant. The most important factor for success is not the popularity of your project, but the problem it solves, and whether there's a way to monetize it. I started making money in 2011 with a GUI for an open source command line tool. The open source software was available completely for free, but compiling it was a hassle, using it was annoying because of a few serious bugs, and you had to use it from the command line. I made money by making an existing, free tool available to people who didn't want to use the command line or compile their own software. I charged a modest fee (initially just $5), and people gladly bought my app to solve their problem. Nobody cared about the fact that it was open source and they could have solved their problem for free; they just considered my app a fair deal. (I still sell this app, MDB Viewer for Mac, but I've since completely rewritten the open source library it depended on)
• lukego 11y ago
  Is your goal to be paid to write your software? Have you considered looking for a job where you would be paid to develop this software by a company that needs it? How do you envision your open source lifestyle business once it is up and running? (do you want to be paid to develop software or are you hoping to make a business that "runs itself"?)
• dschiptsov 11y ago
  There is no sustainable way to monetize an open source project, except to offer a "premium" service (which, unless you are comparable to Redhat by market cap will probably unprofitable - I think Orable is losing money on MySQL) or you offer closed source "enterprises" version, like so many do, but it must be an exceptional tool, like nginx, varnish or nessus. So I am very sceptical about monetization of community-driven momentum (the moment you close the code it begins to stagnate and die). Unless you are leader in your niche the chances for earning living from a project are close to zero. Wordpress or other themes is a different kind of offer.
• chrismartin 11y ago
  Sell your expertise as an integration/support engineer to companies who want to use your project but don't want to dedicate the internal staff time to become experts on same. Every company that emails you asking you for help is a sales lead. "I'm happy to implement/configure this for you. I charge $X per hour, and what you're asking for is about Y hours of labor." To the client, X*Y is often cheaper than the opportunity cost of pulling an engineer away from other work. Also, don't be afraid to make X >> $100 if nobody else offers the same expertise. You can do as much of this as you want, without changing anything about how the software is licensed or packaged.
• joeblau 11y ago
  I have a little over 1000 stars (1044 at time of post) and have made $10 in Bitcoin (Which is worth less than $10 now). That being said, my project is extremely-side-projecty[1]. Others have discussed busies models, so it should be a simple calculation of how much you can charge for a model vs how much it will cost you to run your business and if you can live with the reminder after taxes etc... then I would say do it. [1] - https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io
  • danieloaks 11y ago
    Just have to say, thank you very much for creating this. Use it every for every single new repo I setup, saves loads of time. It's just awesome!
  • jnbiche 11y ago
    It looks like a very useful project that I will probably start using. Sadly, my usual workflow for gitignores is to grab one from a previous project of mine and adapt, or else Google a big project I know in the language I'm targeting, grab from there, and make a few adjustments. Your process looks much more efficient. But how did you even make $10 in Bitcoins? I don't even see a donation link or address, much less a place to sign up for a paid plan. I see a lot of potential, for example, you could expand a premium plan to include other project templates, like maybe travis.yaml, and the various .jshintrc and other ....rc's, perhaps). I'd pay $10/year for that, maybe more depending on how well it was done. Or perhaps if it's just a side project you're not really interested in expanding. Also, Bitcoin just realistically, Bitcoin isn't used by a lot of people, even in the developer community. It's great to include it as an add-on, but I'd think if you want to make money, you need to accept USD.
  • vixsomnis 11y ago
    Bookmarked this. This looks seriously useful (has vim support!).
• curiously 11y ago
  My question for those that have spent years building a product: Was it worth it open sourcing your product? Did you get lot more leads and exposure? I'm afraid of open sourcing because I'm not sure if it will do anything for me, and that I'm giving away years of work away for free.
  • anarazel 11y ago
    I think working on open source, both unpaid and paid, projects definitely has been worth it for me professionally. Independent of self gratification and such (rather important IMO), it has lead to offers for interesting jobs and by that increased what kind of remuneration I could get. Above what I think the additional years of experience themselves would incur. I think it's harder to answer that on the angle of open sourcing projects. I've, together with colleagues, spent the last few years doing paid for feature development for an open source projects. It's possible to have a company around that and support, and grow. But it's not easy. My impression, more from the side lines, being a technical person occasionally involved in sales, is that it help in lead generation, but that the conversion ratio tends to be lower than with leads for a closed product.
    • curiously 11y ago
      >My impression, more from the side lines, being a technical person occasionally involved in sales, is that it help in lead generation, but that the conversion ratio tends to be lower than with leads for a closed product. This is what I'm seeing. Even when I had free trials, vast majority of people were just free loaders, some even going as far as using a prepaid card to get past the requirement. Which is why I'm hesitant to jump on the Open source wagon, I don't want an army of freeloaders now demanding and whining, like I see all the time on github.
      • anarazel 11y ago
        On the other hand lead generation is cheaper... I think it's hard to answer you questions without more information about the type of product. My impression is that plays a large role in viability. ISTM infrastructure type pieces have a bigger chance to open source successfully.
• csomar 11y ago
  1 star. If you are starred by a big tech biz and they are willing to finance you up to $250k/year (or maybe a million per year?) to keep the project running and clean bugs by the very own creator of the project. Because your project is handling infrastructure for them that runs a multi-million dollars business. 100,000 star. If you are starred by your average to not-so-average (high or low) developer. There is no clear monentization plan. But given the popularity, ads and affiliates might bring you $1 per star (assuming a star is 40-50 visits/year). Think about it. You have a bridge between Queens and Manhattan. I'm sure the US, NYC and people are willing to finance, pay you, or buy you. For what-ever big price (might be unreasonable too, to the cost of creation) you ask. But if you have a bridge between Antarctica and the French Southern Antarctic lands (just randomly picked), it'll be certainly an amazing and well-known artefact but I'm not sure how you are going to finance it (especially that Tourism is not huge there).
• dllthomas 11y ago
  One star, if it's from the right person. Revenue is number of people willing to pay you time the amount they're willing to part with. Neither of those can be inferred from number of stars on a GitHub page (it probably has the most correlation with the number of people willing to pay, but there's going to be a scaling factor there that will vary dramatically based on the nature of the project).
• jakejake 11y ago
  I have had a few open source projects with around 250k installs (web apps and Wordpress plugins). One of them I was able to monetize for about $1k per month. I was getting inundated with support requests so finally I created a "product" by putting up a "buy now" button for $250 installation support. I then ran some google ads to promote it. This was an encryption product so it had business users. If you make it easy for people to give you money and you have a useful product then there usually will be a small percentage of users who will pay. But I'm a firm believer that to make money you have to put effort into sales.
• rushabh 11y ago
  I manage a small open source project (https://github.com/frappe/erpnext https://github.com/frappe/erpnext) that churns 100+k per year and helps me manage a small team. It took me 4-5 years to reach here. We make money by providing hosting and also help to other developers working on our platform. I would start with a services plan and a beautiful website. If you are not a designer, do hire one. Good design and quality can go a very long way towards achieving your dream. If your project is an app, you can also go the SAAS (softare-as-a-service) way. But beware, building a multi-tenant platform, and working on user onboarding, marketing your site can be 2x to 3x of your original project your project. The good thing is that once you are there, 1/2 years is a reasonable time, this will only grow.
• joepie91_ 11y ago
  Here comes the unpopular opinion: I don't like open-source projects being "turned into a business" at all. Something's always gotta give. * Paid support: you now have an incentive against improving the documentation. Conflict of interest. * Selling binary builds: your software can no longer be easily recommended and shared by others. * "Premium features": I'd rather call this 'crippleware'. You're intentionally crippling the 'community version' to give people an incentive to pay you money. That's certainly not in the spirit of open-source. Frankly, I don't feel software is a thing that should be sold at all. You're always going to be intentionally (and artificially) restricting something to make that business model work - after all, software is infinitely reproducible at effectively zero cost. Instead, if you absolutely must make a business out of it, offer something like a hosted service (that people can easily replicate themselves, in the spirit of open-source). That way you add something to be sold, rather than taking something from the existing project and asking money for it. The better option is to accept donations, and put some serious effort into getting those going. I don't really understand why people will spend weeks drawing up a business plan, but for donations they just slap a 'donate' link in the footer of the page without thinking, and then complain after a few months that they're barely getting any donations. Accepting donations requires the same amount of thought to make it work. EDIT: No bulletpoint lists on HN? :|
  • lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    Unpopular but not unreasonable. - software is a new form of literacy. Perhaps at some point in the past literate people could contribute to the communi - the fallacy of altruism. Developers working on an open source JS drop list widget are not being altruistic - their contribution to the community could as easily be say working at a soup kitchen, probably with more value to the world. "Contributing to the community" is something we rely on Adam Smiths Invisible Hand to help us with 99% of the time. So while I use and appreciate the OSS developed to date, it has gone beyond a simple charitable model and into an Eco-system beyond any simplistic approaches. I would like nirvana, but it's dubious as a long term strategy for OSS. - conflicts of interest always happen. When it is important enough, say Linus' salary, the community will either whither or find a way to build its own institutions to make the important conflicts managed - like Linus salary. This is part of building strong institutions we hear about so often - getting better at begging vs better at selling seems to be the last point you make. Honestly I cannot see that as a honourable position of trade. We don't have perfect solutions - but we are working on them
• joelhooks 11y ago
  You've made fantastic steps towards making money from your project. It's use in production shows that it has business value. http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ http://nathanbarry.com/authority/ I think Nathan's book describes an excellent outline for success in this regard. Basically you can look into "tiers". You give away "free" resources. Blog posts and the liberally licensed open source software itself. You can also paid resources. A book, perhaps screencasts that accompany the book for a premium price. Workshops and onsite training provide another tier. At the very top is consulting at ultra-premium rates. This is oversimplified, but this is the idea. The "free" stuff is critical, and builds the basis and "proof" for the paid offerings.
• z3t4 11y ago
  When you get the hype, for example front page of HN, that would probably be a good indicator that it should be possible to make a living on it. It doesn't even have to be your own project :P There are excellent comments in this thread btw. I've bookmarked it.
• sytse 11y ago
  It is less about how many stars you have an more about how many enterprises use your software. GitLab has 15k stars on GitHub (we moved the canonical source to GitLab itself a while ago) and more than 100k organizations are using it. But most of our income is coming from larger enterprises in the United States. It you can offer them extra features and market it properly you can expect something like 1% of your users to sign up for a paid plan. Please let me know if you have any questions.
• transit 11y ago