
Ask HN: Have you open sourced your software and still made money? - andrewstuart
I&#x27;d like to open source some of my software.<p>But I also want to make money.<p>I&#x27;m simply not in a position to dedicate the time to developing and maintaining software for no money.<p>So I am wondering.... are there any examples of anyone who has successfully open sourced their software and still found a way to make money from it?
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adtac
This is something I'm wondering about too. I recently made a piece of software
[1] that users can self-host (released under MIT). I also want to offer the
exact same thing as a service to users who can't self-host and simply just
want a pluggable snippet for their static websites.

Obviously, if/when I offer the service, anybody who's tired of paying me money
will simply spin up a VPS, install docker, pull my image, and run it
themselves. It's fairly straightforward (and I'm happy that it's easy to self-
host an instance of Commento). I'm just wondering if it is even worth it for
me to offer this as a service. I'm not really looking for a huge profit - I'd
be happy if it's simply self-sustainable (including development costs).

[1] [https://github.com/adtac/commento](https://github.com/adtac/commento)

~~~
KajMagnus
I think an open source online commenting system, maybe like Commento, is worth
offering as a service. Consider a commenting system that supports login-with-
Facebook, Gmail, GitHub etcetera, spam protection, and email notifications
(which I think most people leaving comments online want). Then, anyone who
self hosts that open-source software, would need to do this, to get the same
functionality as the hosted version:

\- Sign up for e.g. a Digital Ocean Virtual Private Server

\- Sign up for Akismet spam protection

\- Sign up for some send-emails service

\- Login to Gmail, read Google's tech doc about OpenAuth, and create OpenAuth
credentials.

\- Login to Facebook, read tech docs, create OpenAuth credentials.

\- Github: read docs, create credentials.

\- Forever onward, upgrade the server and software, to avoid security
breaches.

This easily takes a whole day, because one will likely want to evaluate and
compare different VPS and email providers, and also Google's and Facebook's
OpenAuth documentation is not so easy to understand (I think). And a VPS +
email service, is going to cost about $20 per month. ...

I imagine that for 99.5% of all people, buying a hosted service will be
cheaper & save many days of work. Only somewhat large companies will want to
self host?

(I'm building something similar to you b.t.w.,
[https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-
comments](https://www.effectivediscussions.org/blog-comments) )

~~~
detaro
Yes, this is totally something worth offering hosted, especially for people
with sites on Github Pages, Netlify etc., but also those that just want it to
work and someone else take care of it. With more and more issues with the free
options like Disqus, a paid alternative without the bullshit is attractive.

On the other hand, your estimation of cost and difficulty only applies to
someone that would start hosting stuff just for this (and even then, the cost
is still off for small use cases)

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segmondy
Are you making money now that it's closed source?

Seeing, making money has nothing to do with it being open or closed source.
Making money has to do with you wanting to make money and going out there and
making it.

There are success stories of folks with opensource making lots of money.
MongoDB just went public. You can also find counterexamples.

If you believe in open source and believe it's the best thing for your
project, then you will do so without regards to profit or not.

If you believe in making money, won't matter if your project was closed or
open, you will also focus on that.

------
segmondy
Are you making money now that it's closed source?

Making money has nothing to do with it being open or closed source. Making
money has to do with you wanting to make money and going out there and making
it.

There are success stories of folks with opensource making lots of money.
MongoDB just went public. You can also find counterexamples.

If you believe in open source and believe it's the best thing for your
project, then you will do so without regards to profit or not.

If you believe in making money, won't matter if your project was closed or
open, you will also focus on that.

------
joshmn
Mike Perham's Sidekiq[0] does okay I guess[1].

[0] [https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq](https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq)
[1]
[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq)

~~~
saluki
y, $800k is doing pretty OK.

Congrats to him.

------
kehers
There are a couple of ways to make money from OSS. My fav is having a paid
managed version. Ghost[1] and Discourse[2] are good examples of this. (I am
using the same model for a personal project [3]). See
[https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-
stand](https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand) for more ways.

[1] [http://ghost.org](http://ghost.org) [2]
[http://discourse.org](http://discourse.org) [3]
[http://suet.co](http://suet.co)

------
saluki
Check out Taylor Otwell the creator of Laravel.

Laravel is a (Rails Like) PHP framework. It's really great, highly
recommended.

It is open source, has a great community.

Taylor also created forge and envoyer they are services, they are great tools
for spinning up servers for Laravel projects, and zero downtime deployments.

They appear to provide his full time income+ and allowed him to hire a
developer to work on Laravel, forge, envoyer and Spark (a product offering
that is best described as SaaS in a box) full time.

So he's helping the community providing a great framework and bringing in
revenue.

Laravel is something great for developers to learn to level up to better and
higher paying projects and gigs. Similar to the learning Rails early on.

Thanks Taylor!

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david90
I think it's your model of operating the software is more then your source.
Open source encourage technical knowledge sharing and collaboration work.
However it can't replace one's or a company's dedicated effort. Imagine Uber
open-sourced, it's as hard as it is to be to replicate it's business and
value.

We are working on a software called skygear
([https://skygear.io](https://skygear.io)) as well. It's open-sourced from the
first day.

------
otras
Here [0] is a great discussion about this topic that came up on HN a few
months ago.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446516)

------
dabockster
You can charge for support services.

