The OSS model for collaborating on code is broadly understood. I'm curious if anyone has been successful in deploying and hosting a SaaS app in an open-source way, using community or public user funding.<p>For example, many of us use Calendly. There are many for-profit Calendly alternatives. Could we band together and create an open-source, truly free Calendly alternative where users split hosting costs in a fair way? The cost for functionality would go down to pennies per user, since no one expects to make a profit. I don't necessarily want to take on the whole burden of self-hosting an open-source platform, but would be happy to pay for usage if those funds only go towards keeping the platform online.<p>Just curious if some such experiment has been successful, or perhaps why they fail.
To me this sounds a bit like what Sandcats/Sandstorm wanted to be; open-source paas that allowed basically one-click deployment of applications from open-source repository of packages.<p>Problem is that all parts of this process needs funding, which makes it difficult to make work. Someone needs to run the physical infrastructure, someone needs to operate the paas platfrom, someone needs to develop/maintain the paas platform codebase, someone needs to develop the actual applications, and someone needs to maintain the application packaging/deployment stuff. And all those someones should somehow get fair market-rate compensation for the work they do.<p>One way of providing compensation is to hand out credits for the service, but in practice it is probably infeasible to make the numbers really work out. And even if all the labor is compensated through service credits, you still need actual real money flowing in to pay for colo and hardware etc, which probably needs to come from the otherwise non-contributing userbase.<p>Not saying it is completely impossible thing to accomplish, but it is really difficult to bootstrap, and almost as difficult to keep running sustainability, especially when individual people inevitably come and go.
Have you heard of Commercial open source (COSS)? It's a growing industry of promising OSS tools combining the benefits of proprietary SaaS with open source software.<p>As for the Calendly alternative instance - have you heard of cal.com? It's free for individuals.<p>I recently wrote this article featuring their origin story: <<a href="https://blog.scoutflo.com/cal-com-the-coolest-open-source-alternative-to-calendly/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blog.scoutflo.com/cal-com-the-coolest-open-source-al...</a>>
A good example of this is Nextcloud. The SW is FOSS. Over 400K installations are hosted in many ways including on home single board computer servers, Synology NAS, on a VPS, or as a service from providers such as <a href="https://ppp.woelkli.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ppp.woelkli.com/</a> or Hetzner.com. The calendar app is very functional and allows booking of appointments based on availability similar to Calendly. This is one of many apps within its large and expanding suite.
That does already exist to some extent. It's relatively niche for now and unlikely to ever get significant market share, but it warms my heart to know that people are doing just that through CHATONS[1]. I can't speak for them, but as a user it a provides a framework for this type of service to be commoditised, but also independent. Not all the providers offer the same services, but I can fairly easily swap provider knowing that the core philosophy is consistent.<p>It's a natural extension of Framasoft, where they opened up their concept so that they were not a single point of failure.<p>The providers are almost exclusivey based in Europe currently[2], likely due to the French origins of Framasoft. But there's no reason it has to stay thay way.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.chatons.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.chatons.org/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.chatons.org/search/near-me" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.chatons.org/search/near-me</a>
No, we don't have the technology.<p>Running a SaaS reliably involves a lot more than just the open source app.<p>Who's going to handle DevOps and Security, product road map, paying for hosting, transactional emails, etc.<p>A SaaS is a business, has expenses, needs revenue.
Seems like it's already mentioned, but I've also had a great experience with <a href="https://cal.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://cal.com/</a> :)
We have this working quite well with the Fediverse where we have thousands of instances of Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Pleroma and so on running of donations of the users of those instances.
The alternative is non-profit SAAS. It will operate like a company and continously improving based on user feedback. But the goal of the company is not to maximize sharehoder profit but to bring delights to both users and employees with minimal cost to users while taking care of the employees.
Check github, I've open sourced my sass as have thousands of others. Look for a project related your niche. Saw a php gym manager sass the other day. So many unique projects are out there