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Show HN: Ringer – Get and provide expert help on Open Source Software

112 点作者 mintone超过 2 年前
Hello HN,<p>Over the past few months we&#x27;ve been building Ringer, an Experts Marketplace focussed on Open Source Software. We want to help make Open Source more sustainable and believe that we can be a part of making that happen.<p>We&#x27;re approaching this from the perspective of the individual developer - if you contribute to OSS then you can register instantly with your GitHub account and list yourself to provide paid support, knowledge and help for the repositories that you contribute to. We only allow those who we can prove contribute to repositories to list themselves as experts, and show details of contribution history for the experts in the system so that customers can see exactly how the experts can help.<p>We process payments to over 100 different countries via Stripe, and handle all of the paperwork to make the process as frictionless as possible, including 1099s for US based experts.<p>We&#x27;re building out tools to improve the developer experience at the moment, and have started to work with customers to design a process that allows them to access expertise quickly whilst working within the constraints of an enterprise environment.<p>For the past 3 or so weeks we have been in an Alpha stage, so this is our Beta launch - we are really open to fresh ideas and opinions. From day 1 I have said to every developer that I have spoken to that whether you love the idea or hate it, all I want to know is why and what we can do better - so HN, please tell me what you think and want it to be!

24 条评论

bragr超过 2 年前
How do you ensure that people aren&#x27;t asking bad&#x2F;sub-expert questions and burning out your experts? From the perspective of being an expert, I&#x27;m not sure how many basic introductions to docker compose [1] I&#x27;d want to do without any advanced questions before it would get tedious. Or worse, the questions boil down to &quot;I&#x27;m struggling to install docker on my laptop&quot; or &quot;help me complete my homework exercises&quot;. You almost might need some level of expert level routing of people&#x27;s questions, e.g. &quot;this seems less like a problem with docker compose than a problem with your app so go talk to the gin experts&quot;<p>&gt;We process payments to over 100 different countries via Stripe<p>You&#x27;ll want to make an PO process + credits model for big companies ASAP. That&#x27;s where the money is.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ringerhq.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;docker&#x2F;compose" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ringerhq.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;docker&#x2F;compose</a>
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ChrisMarshallNY超过 2 年前
I sincerely wish you well on this. I guess I&#x27;ll sign up as a &quot;ringer&quot; for my repos. I&#x27;d suggest some way to do a bulk add (may already be there, as I haven&#x27;t had a chance to explore). I have over 40 public repos, and I know of people with hundreds.<p>We&#x27;ll have to see if this gets abused. I wonder if folks will sign up as &quot;ringers&quot; for repos that they want to sabotage? That could be awkward. I do know that kind of spitefulness exists (I&#x27;ve had people do some <i>really</i> petty swipes at me).<p>Also, we may not be as useful for some repos, as for others. For example, I was the original author of a project that I turned over to a new team, a few years ago. I could answer some basic &quot;why?&quot; questions, but would be useless for current stuff.<p>Would there be some way to &quot;score&quot; for that? Also, maybe some folks would only be useful for subsystems of an aggregate project, that might be in a monorepo.
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remram超过 2 年前
I don&#x27;t understand.<p>On the client side, you are competing with Stack Overflow or opening issues, which is free. You want to replace that with paying someone whose only credential is having gotten 1 PR merged in the target project, and &quot;All purchases are non-refundable&quot;.<p>On the &quot;expert&quot; side, you provide a platform with very low pay, very short-term contracts working with randos, and you have no track record of payment or mediation.<p>I am not sure how you can possibly get this to work.<p>Your ToS also has major red flags:<p>&gt; As a user of the Site, you agree not to: [...] Disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and&#x2F;or the Site.<p>&gt; We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue all or part of the Site without notice at any time. We will not be liable to you or any third party for any modification, price change, suspension, or discontinuance of the Site.
pabs3超过 2 年前
Ringer team: please add Software Freedom Conservancy to the list of open source foundations people can donate their fees to.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfconservancy.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfconservancy.org&#x2F;</a>
elefantastisch超过 2 年前
Is this right? Experts in software like Jest and Storybook think an hour of specialized consulting in the software is worth only $116? There&#x27;s definitely a market opportunity if this is true, but it seems too good.<p>I do think there&#x27;s a challenge in that... as a developer, paying $58 for half an hour that may save me 8 hours is a no-brainer, but this feels like a difficult thing to ask &quot;the boss&quot; to pay for. It gives off Fiverr vibes, and usually there&#x27;s much more ceremony around billing contractors&#x2F;consultants.<p>But if you pitch this to big business needing big support (a context in which this feels like a stupidly good deal), it may also drive up the price by changing the expectation from the ringers as to what they are providing.<p>I&#x27;m rambling, I know... I wish you luck. I&#x27;m definitely watching this space. It seems like you&#x27;ve found a definite potential market, but I think it&#x27;s going to be hard to capture it.
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dvarrazzo超过 2 年前
As someone who is trying to make a living out of free software, I would love to see this project succeeding.<p>The other remotely similar service, Tidelift, has unacceptable terms and conditions: for the compensation they decide &quot;at [their] sole discretion&quot;, &quot;[i]f you do not satisfactorily provide the Services, Tidelift may, at its option and without limitation, (a) require you to immediately re-perform the applicable Service at no additional charge; and&#x2F;or (b) reduce the fees paid, or due to be paid, to you for the applicable Service in an amount commensurate with the cost to the Subscriber to cover the breach and&#x2F;or the cost to Tidelift to assist its Subscriber with covering the breach.&quot; Quotes taken from the May 2022 &quot;Lifter Agreement&quot;, which I was asked to sign for the monthly equivalent of what a professional charges for 30 minutes of work.<p>I hope that Ringer will prove a real contact point between Free Software professionals and professional users.
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pabs3超过 2 年前
I note that the SourceHut folks are working on a similar thing, except its focused on hiring folks to work on open source projects directly, rather than paid support helping folks use projects within something else.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;hire.sr.ht" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;hire.sr.ht</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcehut.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022-08-23-how-does-our-consultancy-work&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcehut.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022-08-23-how-does-our-consultan...</a>
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pabs3超过 2 年前
The FOSSjobs wiki tracks various resources for getting paid to work on open source. I added Ringer there just now, in the freelancing section, which has several other things, but nothing as general as Ringer.<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>
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turkertunali超过 2 年前
I believe that open source developers present themselves better with Ringer. Users will also receive assistance from capable hands. So it will be a win-win situation.
pbronez超过 2 年前
Very cool. Once you have the devs in place, there are a bunch of extras you could build in to attract the big boring enterprise customers. Personnel level things like background checks, work location, quality certification would allow devs to get into smaller, more expensive pools that some orgs want to pay for. Technical solutions to make it safe &amp; secure to have short-term contractors collaborate on your infrastructure would also be helpful.<p>There&#x27;s probably a content marketing side of this as well. If you really have the experts on a wide variety of open source projects, you could write high quality &quot;when to choose X&quot; blog posts. You could back that up with various measures of project health, host round tables where people discuss competing projects they have experience with, etc.
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icon_zm超过 2 年前
I&#x27;m definitely excited to see this succeed.<p>As a long time open source developer, I find that the managing payments part takes up way too much time.<p>Also I&#x27;ve been told that it is very difficult to find&#x2F;connect with expert developers. I don&#x27;t get this but hey if Ringer can help here, that&#x27;s great too!
smashah超过 2 年前
Cool project. I signed up to be an expert on my repos however I think I don&#x27;t show up to potential clients until I add my stripe details.<p>I&#x27;ve tried platforms like this and have secured basically zero revenue from any of them so I&#x27;m hesitant to go through the whole stripe setup process unless I get some confirmed work out of it.<p>So my suggestion is to allow maintainers&#x2F;dev to show up to potential clients before having them go through the whole stripe process.
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matkoniecz超过 2 年前
It claims that I am eligible to be an expert on &gt;150 repositories, including ones where I just fixed typos.<p>It would be nice if it would list ones where anyone was actually interested in support. Or notify me once someone was actually trying to get an expert.<p>So I would know that there is any point on setting up my profile for given repo.
ddown24超过 2 年前
Congrats on what you&#x27;ve built so far. I&#x27;m curious if you have ideas or plans on how to gauge and communicate demand for experts for an open source project you don&#x27;t have listed yet. It would be cool as a project contributor to know where unmet expert needs are in the community.
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danielvaughn超过 2 年前
I was just in an exact situation that called for something like this. About a month ago, I was trying to implement a collaborative text editor for a freelance client. This was my first time working in the CRDT&#x2F;conflict resolution space, and I was completely unprepared for how complex it was.<p>I was using a few open source packages - TipTap, YJS, ProseMirror - but I had a particular use case that the docs simply didn&#x27;t address (long story). It was the kind of help that would really require at least an hour sit-down with a very experienced developer to brainstorm with me on a solution, but there&#x27;s not an obvious marketplace for that kind of touchpoint.
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oneplane超过 2 年前
I really hope this works out well, it&#x27;s a very difficult problem to solve with a chance of making a huge impact. If this is one of the major ways in which we can get FOSS contributors funded, get FOSS users &#x27;paid support&#x27; and solve the &#x27;who is the expert on subject X&#x27; problem all at the same time, everyone will be better for it.<p>The danger of success in this case might be a slow creep in requirements to &#x27;be on Ringer or we do not want it&#x27; for FOSS projects, or if ringer gets bought by LinkedIn or something like that, that would be bad as well.
djbusby超过 2 年前
What about FOSS one knows well and can support but hasn&#x27;t coded for? Like, I&#x27;m real good at Samba and GlusterFS and Hylafax - and&#x2F;or they may not even be on GitHub?<p>Excellent work here, going in the right direction.
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foxhop超过 2 年前
I recently moved my open source projects from github to a self hosted gitlab server. Would I need to make a github mirror to take advantage of ringer?
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jtmarmon超过 2 年前
I found myself wanting this recently (on the consumer side) so really excited to see this!<p>edit: One suggestion - maybe have a discord server that people provide support through, that way there&#x27;s already an (IM-based) comm channel setup. Would def reduce the friction for me (and increase the chances I become a repeat customer)
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FiberBundle超过 2 年前
Love the idea.<p>How exactly do you validate experts? Are you just going by merged PRs (this might be somewhat exploitable though minor PRs, if you&#x27;re successful I&#x27;d assume)? I imagine checking for the quality of PRs would be way too time-consuming to do manually... Do you consult the maintainers of a repo?
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adamdecaf超过 2 年前
This looks like a cool project. It&#x27;s handy to require contributions before allowing someone to be an expert, but is there a minimum level of contributions needed? I have ~141 projects that I&#x27;m an &quot;expert&quot; in but some were contributed to years ago.
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verisimilitudes超过 2 年前
It&#x27;s nice to see this taking the e-mail whitelisting approach, that is <i>be aligned with one of these large corporations or we don&#x27;t care</i>.<p>What&#x27;s to stop someone from purposefully giving bad advice for his amusement?
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pwdisswordfish9超过 2 年前
Pretty hostile to people who choose not to use GitHub.<p>You might as well make a &quot;Log In with Facebook&quot; step into the workflow for people, to &quot;prove that you&#x27;re human&quot;.
pabs3超过 2 年前
Looking at your ToS:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ringerhq.com&#x2F;terms-of-service" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ringerhq.com&#x2F;terms-of-service</a><p>Why won&#x27;t you notify about changes to the terms? At minimum a notice at login would be a good idea.<p>Maybe add some links to Wikipedia for the (presumably USA?) laws users are prevented from using the site when affected by the laws.<p>Wow, it is long. Please add a summary to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tosdr.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tosdr.org&#x2F;</a> :)
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