How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

<i>In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It&#x27;s called open3ABox and it&#x27;s a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don&#x27;t want a cloud version either. It&#x27;s fully remote managed and monitored by me</i><p>This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It reminds me of Ubiquity&#x27;s cloud key. I wish some government grant contractors would try it.

&quot;I have a free version of open3A which is as useful as possible without any limits but of course it is missing advanced functionality. This version gets full support by me via phone and email.&quot;<p>I think that providing support for free version is somewhat unique, however it does make sense - the longer people use her software the more likely they purchase add-on or subscription.

Things that I like about her account: it is sounds like a modest success story with an end that is within reach of more people and places more emphasis on the value of work instead of getting rich quick. The part about her product being open source will also appeal to a certain audience.

I made a great deal of money for a few years providing training and support for the founders of a popular mature open source project.<p>There&#x27;s no customer success team for open source software, I don&#x27;t care how good the community is. A significant chunk of the money charged for my services went back to the founders to continue their work. This is a fantastic model for open source.<p>I encourage more people to connect with the founders of popular projects and arrange a system whereby you can offer training and support on their behalf and in their name (obviously they should vet you). I&#x27;m happy to discuss the particulars of this, including how to sell training and support, how to handle contracts, logistics, all of it. I know this business well and I think it is a net good for all involved. Email is in by bio.

Kudos to the author!<p>I don&#x27;t get this part:<p>&gt; In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It&#x27;s called open3ABox and it&#x27;s a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don&#x27;t want a cloud version either. It&#x27;s fully remote managed and monitored by me more steady income, yay<p>When people object to cloud (SaaS really), I tend to think it&#x27;s about what you could variously describe as ownership, control, privacy, and security. They want to be the only ones who can access their data. They want updates to happen on their schedule. If you want the developer to manage and monitor your installation, why not use a hosted version?<p>Another reason is bandwidth, but I wouldn&#x27;t expect that to be a significant consideration for invoicing software.

I sell my MIT open source <i>Video Hub App</i> for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it&#x27;s charityware). Over the 3 years it&#x27;s resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria.<p>Public: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;videohubapp.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;videohubapp.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a><p>GitHub: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;whyboris&#x2F;Video-Hub-App" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;whyboris&#x2F;Video-Hub-App</a><p>Charityware: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@whyboris&#x2F;charityware-doing-good-with-proceeds-from-software-purchases-e48e66a5d1a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@whyboris&#x2F;charityware-doing-good-with-pro...</a>

No.<p>You sell additional premium extension to provide needed left out of the open-source offering.<p>You sell cloud hosting and on prem hosting.<p>There is nothing at all wrong with that. That you have built a business where you make a living from software you wrote is awesome. I wish I could.

Please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of &quot;open source software&quot;.<p>It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.org&#x2F;licenses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.org&#x2F;licenses</a> )<p>P.S. I&#x27;m not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.

If nemiah is reading these comments... well done! Loved your story!

This seems like an interesting business-model, charge for the open source software because it is worth the money for your customers, and nobody could do the same as cheaply, and because you fly under the radar.<p>But assume profits are increasing and competitors arise. Then what would you do? How would you compete with them? Would you try to make the publicly distributed software less maintainable by for instance reducing the amount of documentation that comes with it?<p>You might have multiple versions of your source-code, some with comments and some without. You could then choose whether to distribute the version with code-comments or one without.<p>You might go further and apply some kind of &quot;minifier&quot; to your source making it harder to understand and thus modify.<p>As far as I understand it GPL gives rights to the users of the software but puts few if any restrictions on the provider of the software. So would it therefore make sense to distribute (only) a minified version of your source-code? That would make it easier for you to compete against your competition.

Pretty great. This is how I would like to work, too.<p>Of course, it would be nice to know how much money the author makes with this product...

I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how many customers would refuse to buy it when it&#x27;s not open source.<p>Asking this because sometimes I also wonder if I should open source my project, but I have my doubts on how much you can gain from it (apart from the nice feeling of contributing to open source ;))

Potential next episode: someone is taking advantage of my open source software, it&#x27;s getting harder to sell it and earn a living.

I wonder if they would do better with an English version of their website? I was looking for something exactly like this early last year and I found no mention of it (and googling in English doesn&#x27;t bring it up now either).

I thought this would be about the repository maintainers of obscure but used dependencies, who then that sell to random passerbys who then make the dependency malicious<p>Because I would like to read about that experience

&gt; The customer gets the code (and functionality) after she bought it.<p>What are the licenses of the software and the extensions in the shop? Is this one of those free-core&#x2F;proprietary-plugins model?

[revision] In the comments section, following the article, she notes the extensions are open source, distributed when purchased. The license used for these extensions is not specified.<p>Thank you for pronoun correction.

Following the recent events, wait until multinational corporation x comes, repackages your software as a managed solution, hosted on their infrastructure and resells it through their channels.

Love it. The raspberry pi is a cool addition.

ITT: People who didn&#x27;t read the article, argue how GPL would make this business model impossible, not realizing code in the article is AGPL licensed. smh, I expected better from HN.

Similar project for time tracking and invoice generation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kimai.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kimai.org&#x2F;</a>

If it&#x27;s AGPL it&#x27;s free software, not open source

The demo site is in German; a language selector is not obviously findable.<p>It’s also excruciatingly slow to load! “Let the software speak for itself” - well, it did - if I were evaluating invoicing software I’d go look elsewhere mainly based on this very poor first impression. Could certainly use some optimization &#x2F; speed up.