Can you be profitable and open source at the same time?
We've all heard about "big time" projects that managed to do this. These are projects with tens of thousands of users (Sidekiq, Discourse and some on).
But is being profitable/open-source viable for your-average-bootstrapped-founder? Have you done it? Do you know a person who has done it successfully?
That's how I run Polygonjs, a WebGL library and editor. It is not 100% open source, and it's actually divided in 3 parts:
1 - the core library, which is fully open source. It is what runs on people's websites when they use it.
2 - the visual editor, which is not open source, and needs a subscription. People can use it without my assistance.
3 - the consulting service, where I help people use the editor, or integrate it into their existing setup.
And I'm always wondering if the offering is attractive enough, or if I should change things.
For instance, Some people ask if they will have to pay a subscription forever when adopting Polygonjs for their sites, and I quickly clarify that they only need a subscription to use the editor, not to run the library. But to alleviate this kind of doubt, I'm considering offering as well as permanent license, with 12-months upgrade. Similar to jetbrains I think, and probably a few others.
You absolutely can, and a lot of people do. You need to either 1) rely on sponsors/patreon/donations or 2) host a product yourself and charge people for access, while still posting your code somewhere.
A good example of #2 is https://sourcehut.org. It's true that it is not entirely a free service at this time, but it will be when it launches. And it's one that I'm very happy to pay for.
Yes! We're launching our open source today actually! And we already have clients from the beta version and we also already fundraised! So I would say definitely yes! If you want to talk more about it feel free to message and I can clarify more, no worries
(If you want to help out here's the GitHub https://lnkd.in/eewNYt_8 and the Product Hunt https://lnkd.in/e7NjKMEJ, we would love it for you to upvote/share)
Yes, this is exactly how I do my business. One of my projects is 100% open source and I sell hosting for it. The other one is also open source but it has a premium paid version which is closed source. I see OSS as a marketing funnel for selling extra features, support and cloud hosting. I've heard dual-licensing works well too, but honestly, I'm scared to try it and seems a bit more complicated to manage.
I know that Typebot currently became open source. Curious what was their experience.