I open-sourced the social media tool I built for my agency side hustle

I do social media management for a handful of local businesses as a side hustle. Six clients, about 40 posts a week across their accounts.

The tool costs were killing my margins. I was paying $480/month between two platforms, and every time I added a client, the bill went up because of per-workspace pricing. The work was profitable. The tools weren't.

So I built my own. Then I open-sourced it.

BrightBean Studio is a self-hostable social media management platform. It publishes to 12 platforms, has a visual calendar, approval workflows, a unified inbox, and unlimited workspaces and users. Basically the same feature set you'd get from Buffer or Hootsuite's paid tiers.

I run it on a Hetzner VPS for about €10/month. That's my entire tool cost now.

I went open-source instead of SaaS because I don't want to run a SaaS. The support tickets, the billing plumbing, the compliance stuff, being someone's mission-critical vendor as a solo dev. None of that appeals to me. Open-sourcing lets me build in public, get contributions, and eventually offer managed hosting without the pressure of day-one reliability promises.

The plan going forward is a managed cloud version for people who don't want to self-host. The open-source version will always be the full product, no feature holdbacks. Same model as GitLab. The hosted version will most likely be free since I do have the hosting costs anyways for my own deployment, no need to charge anyone extra.

Has anyone here gone the open-core or source-available route? What worked? What would you do differently?

Github Repo: https://github.com/brightbeanxyz/brightbean-studio