Scoold
The self-hosted alternative to Stack Overflow Business
I’m happy to announce two powerful new features in Scoold: a built-in MCP server and personal access tokens. These additions open up entirely new ways to interact with your knowledge base, letting AI agents help you search, create, and manage content on your behalf.
Over the past few months, we’ve been busy refactoring the Scoold and Para code bases. The two projects were migrated to Spring Boot 4.x and lots of legacy code has been removed. Para no longer uses Guice for dependency injection and AOP. This allowed us to improve performance, decrease package size and enabled easier native compilation. Additionally, the core Para library was simplified and the AWS SDK dependency was removed as well. We’ve added a new Helm chart for Para with customizable secret keys and more.
We've added three new integrations in 2025 for Teams, Slack and Mattermost. You can now create content from within any of those chat apps, and get notified in a chat channel of your choice whenever a new question (or answer) is posted on Scoold.
So far, 2022 has shaped up to be the year of churn for my Scoold product business. Pair that with the ridiculous inflation and we see a plummeting revenue. About $800 MRR was lost this year compared to the end of last year. I had no choice but to increase the price of the self-hosted license by 200 EUR. The monthly subscription fees for the cloud hosting (Scoold Cloud) remain the same. I try to remain calm and accept the fact that churn and external economic factors will always be a part of the indie hacker's journey.
Scoold Cloud allows you to easily deploy Scoold Pro servers in the cloud. Scaling and upgrades are handled by us, leaving you to focus on your community. When used in combination with our serverless backend, ParaIO.com, Scoold Cloud offers a simple and efficient solution for knowledge sharing within your organization, with zero maintainance.
So far, 2020 has been the worst year and also the best year, in terms of Scoold Pro sales. We now have 30 paid customers, including Home Depot, yey! Our clients wanted to pay with AMEX cards so I had to apply for a merchant account with American Exppress, which was a lengthy process.
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Congrats, man! I've had to use American Express before, but couldn't find a way to open an account from Bulgaria. How did you go about solving that?
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The AMEX merchant accounts website is broken so don't use it. I applied through our payment processor Braintree. Then some guy from AMEX sent me an email with all the application documents to be filled in. It took 2 weeks of emails, back and forth. Finally you get an AMEX Merchant ID for each currency you asked for and send it to your payment processor and then you can start accepting AMEX cards.
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So after a year of successfully selling Scoold Pro without any sort of advertising we had 11 paid clients in total, of which 3 were big companies -- Cisco, IBM and DBS Bank. I was super busy fixing issues and bugs, as well as adding new features requested by the clients.
After a year of maintaining the open source version of Scoold I decided to create a closed source version with premium features, called Scoold Pro. The open source version had been successful so far and my hopes for the Pro version were high. I created a Mailchimp newsletter and notified everyone on the list of the launch of Pro. Soon after the launch came the first paying customer.
I decided to open source the whole project instead of scrapping it. I was inspired by the short book "Rework". After a major refactoring and a UI overhaul I published the code to GitHub and published links to it on Stack Overflow and on several Awesome lists around GitHub.
The project was created back in 2008, released in 2012 as social network for schools inspired by Stack Overflow. The project was meant to help students and teachers collaborate but it failed due to poor marketing (and Facebook). In 2017 Scoold was refactored, repackaged and open-sourced.
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