Indie hackers and open-source projects

I think doing open source projects is a good way to build a following in the developer community, which then helps when you launch developer oriented businesses.

A good example would be Tyler Otwell with Laravel. The base framework is open source, but he has build a lot of businesses around it, like Forge and Spark.

I'm working on Baserow which is an open source online database tool. I've postponed the open source release a bit because I still need to write some documentation, but I have a an early test version that people can try via the website. The plan is to build a profitable business around this tool like for example Sentry and GitLab did.

I can come up with a few ways to monitize this:

• Offering a SaaS version for people we don't have the technical experience to instal this at their own server.
• Maintaining managed environments for larger customers.
• Create an enterprise version with additional features that customers have to pay for on a monthly basis.
• Because of the modular architecture people can also write custom plugin, so I could offer a marketplace where these plugins can be sold. I would then take a small percentage for each transaction.
• Offer priority support.

I am working on https://www.kubestack.com/ which is an open source GitOps framework. Basically my assumption is, frameworks provide real benefits in software development. I am trying to bring the same benefits to the infrastructure automation space.

I've been working on the framework for ~1.5 years now part-time, next to my consulting job. The framework was used for a handful of those projects which was a great way to validate the core design principles. I have now been working full-time on the framework since beginning of April.

So far I'm focused on making the framework more accessible. I've written a ton of documentation and a detailed tutorial. I also created a video. Right now, I'm working on providing a local dev setup. I think an painless way to work locally is a key benefit that all popular frameworks offer. Also, asking people to try something new and requiring them to spawn real cloud infrastructure right away is a huge hurdle. So both the video and the local setup try to make it easier for people to give Kubestack a try.

I've also written a number of blog posts to spread the word and collect some SEO juice.

Monetization is not currently a priority. For now, I believe it's most important to validate my assumption that the world needs a GitOps framework. I've seen some early traction from social media, people joining the Slack channel and 2-3 friends and family users.

I have some ideas for monetization. Both in terms of a product on top of the open source framework and professional services around it. But I haven't even tried anything in this direction yet.

If anyone is interested, please reach out. I'm available both here and on Twitter https://twitter.com/pst418

Profitable business and open source can co-exist.

Check out https://plausible.io/. It is a lightweight, open-source and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. The code is on GitHub and the hosted version is a SaaS subscription product.

I try to open source every part of my code that I can easily isolate, not wondering whether there is a public for it or not.

It's a way to give back to the community, but for me it's more of a way to keep myself accountable for the code I use and write. Open-source is the best way to say "look, no tricks up my sleeve".

https://github.com/47ng

I worked on https://pdfsam.org/ for around 15 years now. Monetizing OSS projects is hard because, no matter what other says, OSS projects are effectively free as in free beer and it's hard to convince people to give money for something free. There is a whole world between a price of $0 and $1. Software is also a very broad concept and monetization strategies that could work for a library may not work for a desktop application or a Linux distro or a database engine. It's hard to monetize a OSS and it's hard to build a community (community as in developers helping).
Donations are not sustainable. You may create something that becomes strategic to other companies and they will be willing to sponsor (but that would feel quite unsteady for me) but don't expect users to donate.. at least not to a sustainable level. There are donations but you will need 1000s of downloads just to get few bucks in donations.
Code contributions are not as many as you would expect. There are code contributions, people willing to help, translators but don't expect truckloads of PRs unless you manage to create the new Firefox, PDFjs, Typescript or any other super successful OSS project. There is also a licensing side regarding code contributions, especially if you have a OSS version and a premium version based on the OSS.
Support your OSS projects. If something helps your business to make money you want that something to keep going, be developed, be patched, be successful and be a solid ground for your business.
Being OSS feels good, fixing issues on something others use feels good, having people reaching out to thank you for your free tool that helped them getting home earlier feels good. It's just not straightforward to make it pay your bills, but it can be done.

Probably @adamwathan is one of the most representative examples of how to turn a passion for open-source into a sustainable business (just take a look at this: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/adam-wathan-just-made-500k-in-3-days-from-his-new-product-603feefe61).

tl;dr He built TailwindCSS and now released a paid component toolkit.

Agree with @guimcaballero. Laravel is wild success story but I think the key principle works—build an open source project that is high quality + grains traction and then launch businesses around it.
Red Hat is another one where they were able to create a business around open source Linux distros ... to billions of dollars.

However, monetizing open source is tricky and to your original question, I don't happen to know of indie hackers working on open source stuff as their business.

Suggest taking a look at Nadia Eghbal's work: https://nadiaeghbal.com/. She's done some deep thinking about this.

Also recently traded some thoughts with @saasify on the topic.

We love Open Source at CKEditor. Today we launched Open Source browser extension that allows for WYSIWYG editing in GitHub issues, discussion, wikis. We are dying for feedback :)

https://ckeditor.com/github-writer/

Well not a project project but a library https://github.com/drawrowfly/tiktok-scraper

Also managing few more of my other repos

We're working on https://scrapingant.com and we've found open-source as one of the most interesting directions. But it's all about open-source because we're making the product for developers - API.

Basically, it can be a demo project, SDK, general library, or some specific-problem library. As well as delivering it to NPM, PIP, etc. it can be a good community creating direction.

I sometimes work on opensource projects.. bug fixes.. etc.

If you are asking free/opensource product... (I generally do it for my own use OR weekend fun).

https://www.hdrainbow.com --- image to color palette
https://Stringify.me --- profiles for developers based on json
https://Markdown.site --- free online markdown editor to generate .md/html
https://Write.wtf --- anonymous writing platform

Except for hdrainbow(few thousand users/per month) others not able to attract crowd.

Definitely! While building Skyhop (GitHub) I figured some of the core functionality I would want to have was not really available anywhere, so I decided to open source it.

Now it might not be immediately obvious why I'd do such thing. Several reasons:

• If one were building a product like Skyhop, there is an amount of work required not many people would be interested in investing.
• People with very specific (small scale) use cases would be better of implementing some of the libraries I built instead of using Skyhop
• For high scale use cases people would automatically be better off using one of the API's I'm offering with a subscription. The investment in a subscription just isn't worth the time to build and maintain something like that yourself.
• Every implementation using one of these libraries automatically gives me a little credit (attribution and such)

Besides the libraries I've built I would consider the blog posts I write also open source contributions. Sometimes I'm writing about novel stuff which took me weeks to properly understand, which would definitely help other people. Blogging is something I do primarily to help myself stay on track, and organise some of my ideas.

I think doing open-source for the sake of making money wouldn't pan out as one would expect. A typical project needs a fairly long time to mature enough so that it has an somewhat established community around it. After that, there is two major ways to monetize it. Either you can take donations, like many Github projects do now, which would mean you will -probably- have unstable income, or you can build paid tools and products related to the open-source project, like Laravel, Tailwind, and many other do. It'll take at least months to make a living out of any of them though.

Selling somekind of a service for your open-source project is also an option. Not everyone is tech-inclined and even some tech-inclined people rather pay a fee to make something work instead of spending hours on making it work.

You can always take an approach similar to Gitlab. Open source core, paid enterprise features as a subset codebase. Or you can go with a different approach, like the fair source license (https://fair.io). I’m looking to take a hybrid open/proprietary approach for my next product, since it is something that really requires community contributions, and license free seats for contributors as incentive.

Yeah, I am making a website for people who want to learn university-level mathematics. These are often developers and I was already asked multiple times if my project is available open source.

So I am thinking about publishing it very seriously.

There is one benefit I don't see mentioned. People are saying about contributions, but apart from writing code, github would be a great plaftorm to debate ideas.

For example if I was not sure if a feature X was really needed, I could just make an issue and let people comment what do they think.

Yes, I work on open source from time to time. And ideally I would love an open source product that generates money (I am nowhere near that).

Examples:

• https://github.com/strzibny/invoice_printer
• https://github.com/strzibny/ruby-ares
• https://github.com/fedora-ruby/gem-compare

I think you can at least open source some parts of the projects and keep the core glue closed.

I am working on QUIQQER. Besides, I build companies and products with friends and business partners.

The base is free our support / service is not. Some shops will go online this month.
The next weeks and months I would like to start into the documentation that others can also build services or e-commerce shops without much problems.

So the monetizing is going through the stuff I'm building with QUIQQER.

bashboard.io is open source. Launching only tomorrow though, dunno if it'll succeed money wise. In my mind there are the following benefits:

• My first rist with the project is that it never gets seen and OS helps spread the word even if just a little. Especially since part of my audience is devs.
• if it does fail commercially, then I don't have to keep the high hosting costs, and my software that I put a lot of effort into is still available.
• I love the idea of my product being manipulated and used in how people in the world see fit. I run into this problem constantly: product X is great, but missing small feature or has bug. It's closed, can't fix. Damnit!

My business model is basically hosting. You can self-host, but you'll get a trusted hosting provider and support if you choose my service.

I work on an open source tool that I use myself a lot and have also posted on Indie Hackers in the past. I think many of the lessons how to grow a business apply to growing the users of an open source project.

I know I have to make the landing page of my project more clear... but anyway, here it is :)
https://haltakov.net/simple-photo-gallery

@cuu508 is doing this with Healthchecks.io

I run https://bullish.email as an open source project https://github.com/eduardosasso/bullish

I am also having similar thoughts. I am planning to create an open-source project and the response to this post is a good pointer to set initial expectations.