Hi HN,
We’re launching Open Self Service (O2S) – an open-source development kit designed to make it easier to build composable, API-first customer self-service portals.
If you’ve worked with headless commerce, you’ve likely seen how composable storefronts simplify frontend development by integrating multiple APIs into a single layer.
Our experience in building headless e-commerce storefronts and customer self-service frontend apps has shown us a gap in the tooling available for customer service apps. While headless commerce has some mature solutions, self-service portals face the same API complexity and personalization demands but lack dedicated tools. O2S aims to fill that gap, offering a composable approach to self-service frontends that ensures flexibility, scalability, and a great customer experience.
Why we built this?
Enterprise self-service portals often need to integrate CRMs, CMSs, ERPs, PIMs, search engines, authentication providers or even e-commerce APIs.
Current solutions on the market:
- Are monolithic and hard to scale, hard to extend with new capabilities
- Require custom builds from scratch, leading to long development cycles and high costs
- Create vendor lock-in, limiting flexibility and future modernization
How O2S solves this?
O2S provides:
- A Next.js-based frontend starter that is extensible, managed with a headless CMS
- An API Harmonization Server that aggregates, normalizes data from multiple APIs and provides it to the frontend
- SDKs & pre-built integrations and tools to extend them, so that you can connect to CRMs, CMSs, search engines, and more
How this helps developers?
- Less integration pain – backend services can change, but the frontend stays stable
- Faster development – reusable UI components and a harmonized API layer
- Modern tech stack – built with TypeScript, Next.js, NestJS, Tailwind
- No vendor lock-in – APIs and services can be swapped without breaking the frontend
We need your feedback
This is an early release, and we’d love input from the HN community. If you’ve worked with customer portals, composable architecture, frontend-heavy enterprise apps, or headless e-commerce, your feedback would be invaluable.
What’s missing? What could be improved? We’re happy to hear any thoughts and welcome new contributors.
Try it out:
GitHub: https://github.com/o2sdev/openselfservice
Docs: https://openselfservice.com/docs
Roadmap: https://openselfservice.com/blog/roadmap
The framework is universal and is designed to be API-agnostic. It provides the frontend layer and a backend-for-frontend / integration server which lets you aggregate, orchestrate and normalize data from any API without tightly coupling the backend to the UI.
Although it's that flexible, our focus is on customer support applications: - Customer portals for managing orders, invoices, and support cases.
- After-sales service portals for handling product warranties, repairs, and complaints.
- Complex Knowledge bases allowing users to quickly find information on any product or related to issues they face.
- Service management apps integrating CRMs, ERPs or even IoT data for more proactive support.
In future releases we plan to deliver more pages/features covering some of the above and also provide more integrations useful for customer support (search, crm).
Hope this helps and you find O2S useful for your case.