Should I make my developer API product open source?
I'm building an API product for developers, it's an abstraction over email and calendar providers so if you have an app that has to connect to a user's email or calendar (perhaps a CRM to track and send emails with clients, schedule sales calls, etc), you don't have to manually integrate with Gmail, Outlook and iCloud yourself, you integrate with my API and all you'd have to do is call send_email(email_address) and I'd handle the backend for talking to each provider.
Does it make sense to make such as developer API product open-source? I've seen some companies make their product open-source or open-core and even some turn their OSS into closed source after they get a few sales (this is what the largest competitor in the space had done, their API was fully open source until a few years ago, now they're targeting enterprise mainly).
But then again there are lots of API companies that are wholly closed source and are pretty successful, like Bannerbear for example. So I'm not sure about the best method to move forward.
I would say that anything you can open source, do open source, specially if it makes a contribution to your ecosystem. I've been working on a Chrome extension and part of the solutions we came up with could have been used by the wider industry so we've decided to open source it.
+1, we're also building open-source chrome extension https://github.com/requestly
The question should be other way around - why not open-source? Unless you have strong reason there, a dev product is likely to thrive more with being open-source
Is there any specific reason you want to open source?
I can relate to some products like MongoDB, PlayCanvas, etc. where the core is open-source, but all the additional perks that they know for, the GUI in case of PlayCanvas for example, are closed source and they are still very successful.
But there are also instances of products like SupaBase which are notoriously hard to self-host, so people end up using the fully managed version any way.
I think it would be helpful to decide on your reason why you want to open source.
For example, I think it makes sense for Plausible Analytics to be open source, because one of their main selling points is 'a privacy focused alternative to Google Analytics'. So, making it open source allows users to verify that it indeed is.
So, think of why you would really want to open source and maybe think about how it could be a value proposition.
And if at all you do decide to make it open source, go for a licence like AGPL so that you can still protect yourself against unfair competitors.
How about making the product open source and setting specific limitations? For instance, you could offer up to 50 free shipping. This way, you can receive feedback on the product to improve it, and also incentivize happy users to make a purchase.
If it's open source, why would there be any limitations on it? The dev could simply self-host it, no?
Well, yes and no. Often, companies do not really want to deal with this stuff and might happily pay for a solution, even if it's OSS.
There will be some cases where that is not true, obviously.
Yeah it reminds me of something like Plausible Analytics, problem is they're more of a product than an API
Open source does not mean free license.
There are some companies who are doing pretty good business with their open source software.
I think that if the product is aimed for developers, open sourcing is good both from trust perspective, and from growth potential as you can have users contributing.
Maybe try talking to owners of open source commercial products such as n8n.
Yeah I'm thinking the same, open source with no support but then the cloud version has support as well as being paid which is valuable for enterprises.
If your goal is to turn this into a business, you might want to consider whether the API itself is the value driver, or if there are other extensible services you can add, which would make the full service valuable.
If it's just the API, you might not want to open source. If there's a compelling service which is built around an API, then open sourcing might make more sense to drive adoption early.
Thanks. It'd be the hosted version of the software, mainly for medium size to enterprise clients. So it's not exactly the API that's the value add I'd say, it's more so that I'd handle any changes for the company if they use my cloud service rather than trying to use it just within their organization and having to set it up, update it, maintain it etc. It's similar to Plausible Analytics I guess, it's also self-hostable yet they still make a ton of money due to offering the hosted service.
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.