
Ask HN: Would you pay for a cloud/hosted version of an open source project? - huydotnet
Hello fellow HN-ers,<p>Let me put some context: I&#x27;m running a free service, mainly focused to the developers and tech savvy. I want to monetize it, of course, but I already made it open source from day-1, under BSD license, and I don&#x27;t want people think I&#x27;m a dick, also, there are some people already contributed to the project.<p>I&#x27;m thinking of rolling out a paid plan for using cloud version of it, and if people don&#x27;t feel like they should pay me, they could always host it themselves on their own server.<p>The paid plan will also contains some exclusive features that will not be available in the open-sourced version.<p>Do you think this is a reasonable approach, and if you&#x27;re my user, would you willing to pay for it?
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JohnFen
It sounds like a reasonable approach to me.

I wouldn't personally be willing to pay for it, but that's because I'm
allergic to using cloud services, not because of the paying. But I'm clearly
in the minority when it comes to cloudy things, so this shouldn't affect your
decision-making.

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huydotnet
Thank you so much! Yes, there's some large percent of users asking for it, so
I think it's might be a good way.

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soamv
Do you have some sort of user community? A slack or discord or whatever? Just
ask your users. The ones who say yes will also be a good set of beta testers.

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huydotnet
Yes, but mainly because I don't want to bring this up to them too early, so I
asked here first :D

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soamv
Fair enough -- then I'd recommend contacting the few most active users through
DM/private messaging etc.

There really is no substitute for talking 1-1 to potential customers.

Good luck :)

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huydotnet
Thank you so much!

