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How to pay your rent with your open source project (2020)

321 点作者 gregnavis超过 2 年前

27 条评论

rthomas6超过 2 年前
There is one important monetization strategy that is overlooked by this article: dual licensing. License the source explicitly for non commercial use only, then offer a commercial use licensed product (plus support, usually) for a fee. If there is a big community of hobbyists in the relevant field who do the same thing in their dayjob, I think this works well.<p>Edit: A more open source version of this is to GPL the source and offer a more commercial friendly licensed product for a fee. I don&#x27;t know if this technically goes against GPL but I have seen people do this.<p>Edit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multi-licensing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multi-licensing</a>
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endorphine超过 2 年前
I&#x27;ve started a hobby&#x2F;passion project a few months ago, and I&#x27;m constantly dreaming of quitting my day job to start working on it full-time (as opposed to doing it at midnight and getting sleep-deprived). Hard to give up a well-paying job when you have a family and financial goals ahead, but perhaps it&#x27;s doable with donations?<p>Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
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pksebben超过 2 年前
I have a concept sitting in &lt;that folder with all the ideas&gt; that is pretty high on my list of &quot;man, I want to make this happen&quot; but would need a team to execute on.<p>The idea is to integrate the kickstarter model with github&#x27;s issues (specifically, feature requests). You run an open-source project and people can submit feature requests that come with a fundraising campaign.<p>When someone wants the software to do something new (support a new platform, implement an interface, etc) they draft a campaign a la kickstarter, someone who can contribute to the project negotiates with the drafter pricing, targets, and stretch goals.<p>Past this point, it&#x27;s the drafter&#x27;s responsibility to do the marketing for the campaign and raise funds. Once the target $ amount is hit, it&#x27;s on the person who picked up the contract to get the work done.<p>There are, of course, a ton of details to work out, and executing on this is going to be resource-intense on a number of vectors that aren&#x27;t necessarily technical (legal, finance, hosting costs). Also, I suck at UI. The business itself would naturally be a non-profit.<p>addendum: I also have a day job that I have no intention of leaving, so factor that in to time-to-completion.
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rozenmd超过 2 年前
The revenue growth (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MarkoSaric&#x2F;status&#x2F;1532284305086586880" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MarkoSaric&#x2F;status&#x2F;1532284305086586880</a>) makes me smile - as a developer, 0 to $400 MRR in 12 months from only &quot;building in public&quot; seems about right, it&#x27;s something I experienced with my <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlineornot.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;onlineornot.com</a> project.<p>Spending months just building and occasionally posting a Show HN or a producthunt launch is not nearly enough marketing. People need to know you understand them, and the problem, and you need to convince them you&#x27;ve got something that&#x27;ll make the problem go away.<p>It&#x27;s not until you&#x27;re really shouting from the rooftops (and putting out spicy articles about Google analytics being illegal in Europe) that people start to notice you.
hospitalJail超过 2 年前
My 2 pieces of advice:<p>&gt;Don&#x27;t expect it to pay rent for the first 7 years, after 7 years, expect to pay 1-2 months of rent.<p>&gt;Use your fame to push a similar product to pay for the other 10 months of rent<p>I have learned that the first years are slow to gain popularity, but once you have it, you know what works and what doesnt work. Pivot to things that people really care about on a different project, maintaining the original product for popularity&#x2F;advertising. 99% of what I give away is free, then 1% at a cost.
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hlandau超过 2 年前
One method this article doesn&#x27;t mention is a &quot;sell the binaries&quot; model, usually combined with some level of support (consumer software) or a support contract (more complex&#x2F;enterprise things). This model personally appeals to me.<p>For example, I believe the Ardour DAW uses this model. But more importantly it&#x27;s basically the business model of Redhat, which is presumably the most successful FOSS company there is.<p>Another option is to combine the &quot;sell the binaries&quot; model with a trademark model, where only the official binaries can bear the name of the project. Third parties can offer their own binaries but just have to change the name. Again this is also obviously part of Redhat&#x27;s strategy (and for the off-label versions, see CentOS, etc.)<p>Another option is a variant on selling support contracts, but specifically about maintaining old versions of your software you maybe wouldn&#x27;t ideally want to support anymore; it is possible to sell private maintained branches of older versions which are out of public support. However the viability of this depends on having some old versions, and depends on how often you break compatibility, which is after all what creates demand for the older branches.<p>The &quot;premium version&quot;&#x2F;&quot;open core&quot; option mentioned in the article has some serious downsides. The most obvious is that you create a systemic incentive to handicap the FOSS project. You end up competing with your own project, so you have to ensure the FOSS project doesn&#x27;t become as good as your premium version.<p>Imagine if feature X is implemented in the premium version only. Now an external contributor writes an independent implementation of feature X and raises a PR with the FOSS project. Is it going to get merged? Probably not. The conflict of interest compromises the operation of the FOSS project. Essentially, you create something that undermines the ability for the project to be as good as it can be. You create a situation where the organisation&#x27;s stewardship of the FOSS project is detrimental to its potential. (Pertinently, today nginx just announced they&#x27;re going to ease off on at least some of this...) [1]<p>Fundamentally open core isn&#x27;t a very satisfying answer to the question of &quot;How do you make an income from FOSS?&quot; because it is basically the answer &quot;Make some software which isn&#x27;t FOSS.&quot; It&#x27;s not a true answer to the question.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32572153" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32572153</a>
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didgetmaster超过 2 年前
I too have a &#x27;hobby project&#x27; that I have worked on for several years. I must say that my motivations have varied quite a bit over that time. I mainly do it because it is a passion of mine and I love to write great code that does amazing things. But I would also love for the project to actually make some money. I don&#x27;t really need the money, but money is a great indicator of how other people value your work. Money would also let me buy the extra help that the project needs.<p>It is a data management system called Didgets <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;didgets.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;didgets.com&#x2F;</a> and is currently in open beta. The ideas came from decades of experience working with other data management systems that I thought needed drastic improvement. I dug deep into file systems while writing network file system drivers and disk utilities (PartitionMagic and Drive Image). I spent years working with Postgres databases.<p>I love writing code that does big things faster and uses less resources than traditional systems. I wanted to be able to find a group of files among 100s of millions of files in seconds instead of using long directory traversal methods or the arduous task of creating separate indexes that could become out of sync with the file system. I wanted to query huge DB tables in record time without needing separate indexing structures that can slow down transactions.<p>So I will stay up until 2am tweaking an algorithm or parallelizing some code so that it runs through a large data set in 2 seconds instead of 20. This keeps me going, but I also wouldn&#x27;t mind at all if a bunch of other people also found this valuable and decided to pay me something for my hard work.
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phgn超过 2 年前
Please add (2020) to the title!<p>I thought this was yet another plausible.io post about how much money they&#x27;re making, but turns out it&#x27;s the original one.
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bkq超过 2 年前
They wrote another article about how they went about building a $1M ARR open-source SaaS [1]. This details some of their approach to building the product in public as a form of marketing. The building in public approach works, if you already have a platform to stand on in my opinion. As someone who also has an open-source SaaS they&#x27;re trying to market, I sometimes think if I should have also taken this approach, despite not having any reach at all.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;open-source-saas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;open-source-saas</a>
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franciscop超过 2 年前
I really like that this is one of the first Open Source Funding articles that I read that strongly acknowledges that devs create open source for many varied reasons. I have grown tired, as an OSS dev myself, to be bagged into a single category in most other articles and someone speaking for me saying things I might or might not want at all.<p>Heck, what I want as an OSS dev myself, as well as my personal situation&#x2F;context, has changed dramatically over the years and I expect will change again in the future, so thank you Plausible for not throwing me into a single-bag and for not speaking for me.<p>Example: 4 years ago you&#x27;d tell me to write OSS part-time for 20k&#x2F;year and I&#x27;d love it, today I&#x27;d strongly reject it, in 5 years I expect to do it part time for free again (or maybe not).
erdos4d超过 2 年前
I swear this sort of thing strikes me as 10X the trouble as just getting a job. Even if you write something that others want (highly unlikely, let&#x27;s be honest), trying to monetize it adds so much hassle to the whole thing, it isn&#x27;t worth it. Easier to get a remote gig and just fund the project that way.
orliesaurus超过 2 年前
Funnily enough I wrote my own version of this exact topic, based on the fact that I am too trying to make money from open source work [1]<p>From experience, I find it that it&#x27;s always better to start with a paid offering and an open core solution. For example: you rather host it, configure it and upkeep it yourself? it&#x27;s free Everyone else: pay me a little money which will go towards the upkeep of the project.<p>I do find that there&#x27;s another viable option: Bigger companies writing open source software. In fact there should be MORE companies like that. They should be motivated in writing open source software. Why? They have more money and are very unlikely to just &quot;fold&quot; - as opposed to a developer vs the world.<p>I dream of a world where all companies have salaried open source teams of maintainers , building technology in the open that they themselves use and find useful but that they will maintain throughout the years.<p>If things go well one day we can get there....<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;orliesaurus&#x2F;how-do-you-monetize-open-source-4g4c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;orliesaurus&#x2F;how-do-you-monetize-open-source-4...</a>
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nwilkens超过 2 年前
Triton DataCenter[1] is open source[2], and has commercial revenue in excess of $1M ARR. We were fortunate to acquire this product from Joyent earlier this year[3], and are now well on our way to the next revenue target.<p>Triton was built on the backs of giants -- so a slightly different scenario than most.. But it is clear that customers will pay for open source products, and you can more than pay your rent one day!<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tritondatacenter.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tritondatacenter.com</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tritondatacenter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tritondatacenter</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mnxsolutions.com&#x2F;triton-faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mnxsolutions.com&#x2F;triton-faq</a>
aothms超过 2 年前
What I didn&#x27;t see discussed is VCs focussing on open source (quick search returns e.g <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oss.capital&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;oss.capital&#x2F;</a>). Does anybody experience with or thoughts on this?<p>I read a lot of comments on the intrinsic difficulty of earning money with foss, so advising against it or to treat it as a secondary side project. It&#x27;s pragmatic, sure, but sometimes foss is a central to the value proposition, like in situations that require high amounts of trust or adaptability. A couple of hours a week is not always sufficient to retain momentum. So imho there is really a need for true foss business models.
ahaucnx超过 2 年前
If you run an open source hardware project like we do with our DIY air quality monitors [1] you can also monetize it via selling hardware kits or work with affiliate links to e.g. Amazon or AliExpress.<p>However selling hardware has some additional challenges e.g. warranty, lost shippings, component shortages etc that you need to factor in.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airgradient.com&#x2F;open-airgradient&#x2F;kits&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.airgradient.com&#x2F;open-airgradient&#x2F;kits&#x2F;</a>
milkoolong超过 2 年前
&gt; In general, it is useful for many projects to be aligned with something people or businesses believe in so much or find value in that they are willing to pay for.<p>The end of the day it comes down to audience regardless of your code being open source. I chose an alternative analytics based on the founders&#x27; business acumen, morals and ethics before I even considered open source. Similarily, Discord Nitro over Matrix and Circle&#x2F;Mighty Network over Discourse.<p>The author shared good examples but for majority of projects, it doesn&#x27;t make sense to open source it as a path to financial security. I&#x27;d argue it actually hurts many niches. I assume Plausible has a healthy dose of startup clients who are techie that see open source first as the holy grail for trust, transparency, and security. That&#x27;s a solid audience! Otherwise, think again.
O__________O超过 2 年前
Related post by Plausible Analytics:<p>- How we built a $1M ARR open source SaaS<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;open-source-saas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;open-source-saas</a>
debarshri超过 2 年前
May be I&#x27;m naive but would love learn why if the end goal is to monetize your software why does it have to be opensourced. From my naive perspective it feels like when you mix the accessing the source and business, conceptually it becomes very complex. From an end users perspective, all these different types of licenses makes the actual user experience of buying the software complex.
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mfts0超过 2 年前
That’s interesting threat. I strongly believe in sustainable monetization in open source software. There’s a project called Tea (tea.xyz), a package manager as the evolution of Homebrew.<p>I honestly believe that understanding the entire dependency graph of open source project will help redistribute money to all packages democratically.<p>I’m curious to hear what other devs think
benreesman超过 2 年前
I like open source &#x2F; free software that has the financial imperatives in plain view: that enables me to make informed decisions.<p>The best case when heavy lifting is taking place with a murky payroll is that there’s an Enterprise version you’ll eventually need. The worst case is, uh worse.
paydevs超过 2 年前
For a curated list of monetization approaches have a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PayDevs&#x2F;awesome-oss-monetization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;PayDevs&#x2F;awesome-oss-monetization</a>
pabs3超过 2 年前
Some more resources on paid open source work:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fossjobs&#x2F;fossjobs&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;resources" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;fossjobs&#x2F;fossjobs&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;resources</a>
soheil超过 2 年前
Only if landlords accepted code as payment, ideally countable code, maybe by number of lines.
tomerbd超过 2 年前
luck
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scombridae超过 2 年前
tl;dr a 2020 rehash of same ineffective saws (pro version, donations, support).<p>Every ten year old realizes the easiest way to sustain the lemonade stand is not giving away the lemonade.
aret超过 2 年前
The root cause problem here is having to pay rent in the first place.<p>It&#x27;s appalling to think of just how much of our hard work and economic output is being skimmed off by landlords who just lazily sit around doing nothing productive while receiving all the rent money that so many of us have to pay as tribute, just to avoid being homeless.<p>All this hard work I do so my landlord can pay off his mortgage. Makes me wonder, what&#x27;s the point?
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teddyh超过 2 年前
An open source project does not, and cannot, <i>in itself</i>, make money (EDIT: Except if your project is very well-known; then you can solicit donations.). Something which makes money must, at most, be an affiliated activity. If I sell guided hiking tours, can I claim that the mountain makes money?
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