Hello HN!<p>Vedant, Kalpesh, and Akhil here - the Co-Founders at Scoutflo.<p>Vedant and I have been in the B2B SaaS Sales background for a combined of 12 years. We've worked with Browserstack, ZoomInfo and other SMEs and startups. Akhil has been a Software Engineer for over 5 years – specializing in SRE/DevOps at Zeta.<p>We’ve built a marketplace exclusively for commercial open source (COSS) products.<p>What is COSS? [1]<p>COSS or commercial open source is the best of both worlds – combining the benefits of open source and commercial business models.<p>Adopting a commercial model on top of the open source layer helps COSS companies generate revenue to sustain the development; while serving the needs of, and offering reliable support to paying customers.<p>The general principles of open source help with benefits like transparency, community contribution, higher customizability, no vendor lock-ins, and cost-effectiveness. [2]<p>Some examples of COSS products are OpenBB (Bloomberg alternative), Cal.com (Calendly alternative) and Medusa (Shopify alternative).<p><i>“The next wave of SaaS is COSS”</i><p>Scoutflo Atlas lists 220+ competent COSS products.<p>You can search for open source alternatives to proprietary products via category or keywords.<p>You can also compare up to 3 products based on metrics such as:<p>- Hosting and Pricing
- Tech stack
- Community strength<p>There’s an option to switch to ‘<i>Scoutflo’s Choice</i>’ - where you get to try out a Sandbox (free trial) version, and easily self-host a product.<p><i>currently applicable for selected products (Beta)</i><p>*The Why behind Scoutflo*<p>While working on another problem statement, we came across 2 open source products Papercups.io and Chatwoot (both YC-backed).<p>More research and conversations led us to MANY well-built, good quality open source products that clearly lacked the visibility or reach as that of their proprietary counterparts.<p>[Scoutflo’s origin story: <a href="https://scoutflo.com/origin-story" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://scoutflo.com/origin-story</a>]<p>Our B2B Sales background and experience helped us identify the problems and loopholes in the customer lifecycle.<p>Scoutflo Atlas is built to help with the awareness and distribution of open source products; while making it easier for their potential customers (businesses) to discover and evaluate them.<p>Increasing awareness and simplifying evaluation are the first logical steps to address this problem statement.<p>The immediate (or eventual) next problems are testing, onboarding, and maintaining these products on your preferred Cloud infrastructure – and we’re actively working on productized, scalable solutions for them.<p>TL; DR<p>The What: A marketplace platform for commercial open source (COSS) products.<p>The Who: COSS companies and businesses.<p>The Why: Help businesses find high-quality and reliable open source products, and help COSS companies with discovery and distribution.<p>The How: Scoutflo Atlas - To amplify vetted, high-quality open source products (Live - Show HN)<p>Scoutflo Sandbox - To get a quick, free trial (Beta version)<p>Scoutflo Deploy - To simplify adoption, self-hosting, and maintenance (Waitlist Live)<p>Happy to address any and all related questions, and receive some feedback from the HN community! :)<p>Notes:<p>[1] More about what is COSS and where it’s headed (our blog)
<<a href="https://medium.com/scoutflo/whats-the-open-source-hype-all-about-6fb55d81e7e" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://medium.com/scoutflo/whats-the-open-source-hype-all-a...</a>><p>[2] From Community to Commercialization by Peter Levine and Jennifer Li <<a href="https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/open-source-from-community-to-commercialization/\" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/open-source-from-community-to-co...</a>>