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Found an open-source competitor to my product

Today, I found a competitor to my product that's completely free / open-source. Looking at it, I think that I still have a better product, but it's demotivating to find this. The name is even almost the same.

There are a few reasons why I'm not completely in the dumps:

  • I think the market segment / positioning I'm going for is better
  • I think they have made some key assumptions about how people use the product that are incorrect
  • I think they are missing some key features that are important.

That being said, the main question I still have to answer is, "Is this pain large enough that people will pay for it?" I flip-flop between what I think the answer to that is.

It definitely doesn't help to see that a competitor is offering a significant piece of the value my product has, for free.

Has anyone here dealt with a similar situation? Were you able to still deliver enough value to your audience that they were willing to pay?

  1. 4

    Yes, I was in same situation before. I always doubt with my projects, until I found this video from Jason Fried
    https://youtu.be/XzvUX1IAHos

    Now, I just focusing on shipping high quality product for my customer

  2. 2

    Because I am not sure what your product is I am assuming it requires some form of cloud based hosting, i.e. for the open source alternative you would need to set it up and pay to host it.

    I wouldn't be too worried, the pain in open source is hosting, making sure you update to the latest version and being the maintainer of another system. As a full-stack dev with over 15 years experience, this isn't something I would want to do, I would much rather pay even double the cost of the hosting just to have it managed for me.

    I use various tools like Sentry.io that have an open source version, but I would much rather pay for their hosted cloud product and never have to worry about it.

    Guess it depends a lot on your market and how much value the product provides, I don't think I'd lose any sleep over it.

    1. 1

      That's true, one of the big differences is that my product allows collaboration between teams/users due to the cloud-based hosting. The open-source version is an electron app that lives only on your computer.

      They theoretically could update the product to include the collaboration aspects, but they are limited by what you mention above. They would have to use github gists exclusively.

  3. 2

    I don’t know what kind of market you operate in, for me it’s web components, and there’s plenty of open source and free competitors to the product I’m selling.

    Still, my product is doing fantastic.

    I think it’s because of a couple reasons:

    • certainty, if you’re being paid to work on something, your customers know you’re not going to abandon it because you found something shinier to work on. (as someone who also runs open source projects this is what happens)

    • support, if you’re going to use an open source product in your business then it can be risky to have to rely on support based on goodwill of maintainers

    • because I’m making money with my product I can spend a lot of time on it and create further distance from competition

    • in my situation I think I can create a very specific product with a very clean and nice look n’ feel that would be difficult to do in an open source situation where most of the time you see very generic “one-size-fits-all” solutions.

    • you already kinda touched on this and I want to emphasize it as well, because you’re clients are paying I think you can get a better sense of what they really need because the interaction with your customer is wat more direct/personal

    My product: https://pqina.nl/doka/

  4. 1

    I have an open-source competitor as well, who ranks beneath me on Google.

    I wouldn't worry about it. Honestly, you're always going to have someone offering what you do for cheaper or for free. Just aim to provide more value for the right kind of customer.

    Some people are choosing the open-source solution over mine for sure, but I'm charging $597 – some people are not going to pay that, and that's OK – the open source solution solves their problem in their price range.

    Plenty of people do pay me $597 however, from my discussions with customers they feel more comfortable paying for something they're confident is maintained, with continued updates and support.

    It also drives me to ensure my product is superior and that I always maintain a competitive advantage through different means.

    Many purchasing decisions are emotional and not necessarily based on price unless you're selling a commodity.

    Open-source software is awesome, especially for indie hackers, but it's not always a sound business decision for various reasons. And as an entrepreneur you have a huge advantage if you're generating revenue and can afford to spend that money working on your product full time, continually developing and marketing etc - open source products will struggle to compete on those fronts unless the dev has a lot of free time and is prepared to lose money on it.

  5. 1

    I would echo what @altlabs said in their post above - I am an experienced back end guy, and I used to love deploying open source apps on virtual servers I would spin up, but these days, I really can't stand the maintenance required to keep servers and software version up to date etc. I would much rather pay someone else to manage all of that while I focus on building my core business/product.

    My own market that I am (HR app) has a few popular open source options as well. I never worry about that though, as our support levels (as you can tell by the testimonials on our website) are what gives us the edge over them and most of our other competitors.

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