Why I Didn't Open-Source My Second SaaS

https://panelbear.com/blog/why-not-open-source/

by amzans • 5 years ago

193 97 5 years ago

Jaygles6• 5 years ago

I don't think the author made a compelling argument as to why open-sourcing his code led to the problems he describes. It sounds like having the code open sourced took too much of his time away since it allowed people to make requests for things. But I don't see why that means he necessarily has to take time to fulfill the requests.

Sounds like he was too focused in one area of his project, and needed to take a step back to get a broader view of the state of things. I'm not convinced the closed/open source nature of his code is responsible for that.

mooreds5• 5 years ago

I think his point was that folks who participate in open source have higher demands for changes and support. If a business is pure SaaS only with no open source code behind it, there is less interaction in general. I'm sure there's still support tickets and whatnot, but there's not the same level of "please fix this" requests. People just move on from commercial packages if they don't do what they need, in my experience.

From the post:

In the past, when it came to running a business as a solo-founder, having it open source created too much maintenance burden for very specific feature requests. In particular from non-paying users, who sometimes sent me emails directly, demanding I look at their issue, or help them fix things “as soon as possible”.

This lack of interaction is both a feature (lets you focus, you have time to take care of paying users) and a bug (less interaction means you could build the wrong thing, the source is no longer a marketing mechanism for you).

Jaygles6• 5 years ago

Right, I agree with you, but as I said

It sounds like having the code open sourced took too much of his time away since it allowed people to make requests for things. But I don't see why that means he necessarily has to take time to fulfill the requests.

The existence of the interactions doesn't necessitate engaging with them. If engaging with interactions is taking too much time away, one could simply, not engage with them.

serial_dev• 5 years ago

Exactly, I think people misunderstand what open source means.

Open source doesn't mean that you need to provide hours of free support to someone who couldn't even bother to write a proper issue description. For a matter of fact, you don't even need to provide free support to anyone, no matter how nice they are and no matter how well they written the issue You can help them, but you don't have to.

You also don't need to accept pull requests: if you think that the feature doesn't make sense or the code quality is terrible, or it's just not important to you, you don't need to accept pull requests.

You also don't need to bend over backwards to maintain a stabile API.

It makes your life easier if you communicate this in the README of the package, tell people that it's the early days of the product, you develop in the open, but you aren't going to abide by other people's unrealistic expectations about your open source work.

Qwertious• 5 years ago

Exactly, I think people misunderstand what open source means.

"Misunderstand" implies there's some authoritative definition on "open source" means here. I remember people considering Dasura "not open source" even though it was GPLv2, simply because they didn't accept patches and only threw code over the wall.

To a lot of people, open source means engaging on Github. You can say "they're wrong", but that's just disagreement.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

I find just throwing code into github is my perfect level of open sourcing. It's public and I can pull the code into any project.

No pesky user requests or stars.

Accepting pull requests on smaller projects seems strange. If I wrote this why do I want someone else sharing credit.

j_san• 5 years ago

While it's technically not open-sourcing code itself it's human nature in my opinion. As a founder you want to support and don't upset your customers, even if they are using the free version of your product. Yes, you could simply not fulfill these requests or not help these customers, but I think for most people it will still introduce stress. There may be people who can deal easily with this, but I think it's natural to be stressed by this and run after things that you shouldn't.

Still I agree that it's probably possible to open-source without these problems and that this is not a complete compelling argument for every case. For me personally at least not open-sourcing at the beginning (like the author did) would probably be preferred as well for a solo-founded project.

KajMagnus5• 5 years ago

I think for most people it will still introduce stress [... ] run after things that you shouldn't.

I think so too. There's personality trait that I wonder if it is related to this: Agreeable vs Assertive, in the Big 5 personality traits,

(Actually I wrote a sibling reply (sibling to yours) and mentioned this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26433328 hmm maybe it'd been better if I had replied to you instead :- ) didn't see your reply until now though.)

jandrewrogers• 5 years ago

My experience is strongly aligned with the author's. There is a substantial real-world overhead associated with open sourcing code, all other things being equal. This overhead is imposed on you whether you want it or not. If you are operating in a resource constrained environment, like the author, then not open sourcing is a sensible cost containment measure. Open sourcing code is a luxury for those with ample time or money.

I have code I could open source (e.g. some very useful Postgres extensions created for a company) but I value my time more, and I know many others that view the calculus similarly. There is value in open sourcing code but we should be honest about the associated costs and not pretend they don't exist.

mixmastamyk3• 5 years ago

I'd tend to agree for a small package. But, this was a company with a community (according to author). Pointing requests to the paid support page would turn lemons into lemonade. We can only speculate why this didn't happen.

3np2• 5 years ago

Shat kind of overhead do you mean, exactly? You could just push it to a public repo on GH/GL/whatever, and then choose your own level of involvement? You don’t have to engage or even provide a means of contact.

KajMagnus5• 5 years ago

I'm not convinced the closed/open source nature of his code is responsible for that

Could that depend on the personality traits of the solo founder? What if it's in some people's nature, to feel bad about rejecting make-sense feature request and bug fixes, in order to instead focus on money making things? (Even if logically it'd be the long term good thing to do.) Whilst someone else might have felt just fine, doing that?

If you know about the Big 5 personality traits, maybe this is related to where you are, in the Agreeable vs Assertive dimension.

For someone who is more Agreeable, then, keeping the SaaS closed source, might be the way to go — so there simply won't be any unsupported platform installation problems to ignore but feel bad about.

marvinblum2• 5 years ago

A few months ago, I've started a similar analytics project [0], which I have now turned into a product [1] together with my co-founder. The difference to Panelbear is, that I've started this to be used on my personal website, so it was open-source right from the beginning and without the intention to make money. In fact, you can still use our core library for free (AGPL licensed).

When we looked at the other solutions out there, we saw that a lot of them offer a self-hosted version for free. Giving away whole products for free has become a trend I don't anticipate. You can be sure there is an open-source, free as in free beer replacement for almost anything, which makes it really hard to build a sustainable business. While you can generate some traction off of it, you also have to deal with people asking for free support, new features, bug fixes, and so on. I have quite a lot of open-source projects, one of them is a game server management web UI [2]. It breaks my heard every time I have to tell someone that I can't support their request. There are cases where it makes sense to have the product fully open-source of course, like an operating system, or anything that can be considered "infrastructure".

Writing software is difficult and it takes countless hours to build something useful that is non-trivial. If it's something a lot of people rely on, think about charging for it, instead of giving it away for free. But in the end it's your time after all.

[0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch

[1] https://pirsch.io/

[2] https://github.com/assetto-corsa-web/accweb

jokethrowaway3• 5 years ago

Free offerings are a great way to stifle competition.

When it's coming from OSS developers who are not making money themselves, it's indeed head scratching.

vemv2• 5 years ago

How about: business logic is and remains private, but support libraries, boilerplate, etc is offered as discrete OSS repositories.

This isn't too fancy - quite commonly corps and startups alike offer some generic libraries. One can take that pattern to greater degrees.

This allows to scratch the itch of sharing something with the community, while still guaranteeing a livelihood.

Of course, it's mostly an incompatible approach for those favoring a strict monorepo- and microservice-based architecture.

marvinblum2• 5 years ago

Agreed. If it's something that has no business value in itself and can be adopted by others (which might contribute in return), open-source it. There are also half-open/open-core models, see my comment below.

mooreds5• 5 years ago

We do this with a lot of our stuff at my current employer. It's a good compromise in my experience.

zomglings2• 5 years ago

git submodules, despite their warts, do help incorporate a bunch of distinct code bases into a monorepo.

vemv2• 5 years ago

That might be also considered a multirepo in disguise :)

mattbuilds• 5 years ago

I have a similar plan with my current project [0] of interactive coding docs. The library to build the docs would be OSS. So anyone could build it and use it in their projects, But the business of hosting courses, payment, an advanced UI for building the docs would all be a SaaS. I think it's a nice balance that gives you the best of both worlds.

[0] https://devbyexample.com

Andrew_nenakhov• 5 years ago

I once thought that the worst in opensource are forum people (later replaced by GitHub people) who demand premium service when they encounter a bug. But then I learned that the worst in opensource are users with access to reviews with rating:

I give you 1/5 because the app doesn't do what I want and you don't kiss my ass nice enough. You don't know how to treat your customers right, how childish of you to ask money to fix my particular problem!!

For some reason a lot of people believe that leaving a review with bad rating for a free and opensource app will motivate the developers fix the issue asap, in hope that the user will change the rating to 2/5.

hydroxideOH-• 5 years ago

This is what happens with my open source Chrome extension's reviews on the Chrome Web Store. Not that you can really make money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life.

seanwilson• 5 years ago

Not that you can really make money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life.

Why not? There's successful projects selling or based around extensions.

Glench• 5 years ago

Heh, it is totally possible to make money off extensions. You just need to provide value. Here are some examples:

- $100k with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/css-scan-made-over-100k-d6...

- $38k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/187-jordan-oconnor-of-c...

- $3.1k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/night-eye

- $2.5k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/weather-extension-ad9...

laurent922• 5 years ago

who demand premium service when encountering a bug

In the same vein, I have a bully, he both writes me on my professional email (to ask me for reparations), AND writes me on public forums 12hrs later asking why I didn’t answer him yet. So it is not only free users who expect premium service, nowadays even bullies expect 12-hrs response ;)

(For all I’m concerned, he can go to court if he really believes I owe him something, I give it 0% chance, but he’s clinging to his illusions).

mrtksn• 5 years ago

I’m curious, what’s his claim? Used your software, something happened making lose data or anything like that?

getpolarized• 5 years ago

The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are VERY aggressive and angry.

The amount of people that personally attack you and accuse you of horrible things should be zero.

I've also seen users personally using our forums to try to get the software for free and complaining it costs too much money.

As soon as it's clear that one of the developers is listening they go quiet but it's super disheartening when your community, which should be supporting you, feels so entitled.

rurp• 5 years ago

The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are VERY aggressive and angry.

Interestingly enough I used to have a customer facing job in a completely different industry and it was exactly the same situation there. 90-95% of customers were great; they were pleasant and easy to deal with. But man, the bad ones took up sooo much time and energy, it was ridiculous.

j1elo• 5 years ago

"I'm sorry let me refund the money you paid for this" must be the all time favorite answer for stubborn or impolite users of software that has been provided for free and with no strings attached.

My second favorite (would be first if not for the slightly snarky style) is "Please, go read the License". This is to say that the License typically states that "this software is provided AS-IS with no guarantees at all", but in a very indirect way that most people won't understand when told to them... but I still like that answer, FWIW :-)

moosebear847• 5 years ago

Lol what the heck, the first one is WAY more snarky than the second! Unless you meant that the second is just not dripping in enough snark.

psychstudio• 5 years ago

The one I typically use with rude, demanding users is:

"Pull requests are always welcome :)"

mcjkrw• 5 years ago

Very common to see on the Chrome store and WordPress.org plugins repo.

sylvain_kerkour• 5 years ago

Very good read, Thanks!

candiddevmike• 5 years ago

I came to a similar junction with my app. It's B2C SaaS, and I bluntly want to earn money for all the years I put into it. I chose to add a free tier and self hosting as a compromise.

In the future, I would love to open source it. But for now, all I see in other B2C/consumer OSS projects is a lot of complaining, frustration, and extra work without a benefit to my paying customers.

mattkrick• 5 years ago

I built an open-source B2B SaaS that recently raised its Series A. While I'm not a solo founder, we were a team of 3 up until we raised our seed.

The difference I see is traduora looks like a project, not a company. Sell support! Don't give it away for free. If someone asks me for a bugfix, I show them the ticket in our open backlog & tell them if they want it done faster, they have to pay. Seeing their concern turned in to a ticket shows them that I care, but telling them I prioritize paid fixes tells them it's not a charity. Don't let them feel entitled.

jandrese2• 5 years ago

If they opt to not pay do you leave the bug in your system forever?

I've always been a little annoyed at this model, because with so many companies it comes down to "I paid you $120,000/year for this support contract and you're telling me you've been able to track down this bug I reported, but you're not going to fix it because it's not on the project your developers are currently working on." And then they get really miffed if you drop the support contract next year, telling us how we'll be locked out of security and feature updates, even though there were zero releases in the past calendar year. If I'm playing for the equivalent of a full time junior developer I expect at least some action on my bug reports.

gcheong• 5 years ago

If they opt not to pay then the bug gets fixed according to severity and priority in the regular development cycles. It's possible it will never get fixed. I see your point with paid support contracts that don't give you anything, and you would be justified to cut your losses, but I think this was more specific to individual bugs that a company wants to up the priority for.

thayne2• 5 years ago

They way I wish it worked, although I haven't seen it really successfully implemtented is that instead of paying for a support contract, you could pay for support in a more a la carte manner. Such as say, pledging money to a bug or feature, and the dev team prioritizes based on how much money is pledged for different features and bugs, perhaps with some expiration so customers don't end up paying for a bug that isn't fixed until years later when it no longer matters.

bartread2• 5 years ago

I paid you $120,000/year for this support contract...
If I'm playing [sic] for the equivalent of a full time junior developer ...

Equating $120,000/year with a junior developer salary is exactly the kind of tone deaf I see too much of on here[0], but in this instance it plays in favour of your argument.

Depending on exactly where you are in the world - even within the US - $120k might be a much more senior salary, or several developers worth of salaries. It then becomes perhaps even more galling that you're seeing zero service for that outlay.

[0] Yes: I know junior devs in SV might get this but SV is not the world.

kureikain• 5 years ago

I used to swear by Open Source try to build an uptime monitoring but failed https://github.com/yeo/notyim and a few other thing.

Eventually one day I want to do email forwarding, I was thinking open source or not and pretty much chooese to go with close-source for now.

I can see myself open source in the future when I get enough customers and I have more time to cleanup the private stuff in our mono repository right now.

But for an early self-bootstrap self-funded I feel like focus too much on Open Source and I don't have time to focus on the growth or marketing.

I finally release my first SaaS this year, make $78/month right now(don't laugh at me). https://hanami.run

I would say I'm not against opensource and it definetely work for others, but for me, by not going open source I can focus on the business itself. With that being, I contributed back such as a mail parser https://github.com/yeo/parsemail https://github.com/yeo/pix

I can imagine myself release a lite-version(our early prototype) where we can forward email using a config file, instead of a database with all the user, membership stuff that no one care about if you want to self-hosted my SaaS.

StavrosK3• 5 years ago

This is semi off topic, but the sentence "housing in Munich has gone insane" struck me. Housing in my city in Greece has gone crazy too, a two-bedroom apartment costs significantly more than minimum wage, and I don't know who can afford to stay there.

Does anyone why housing everywhere seems to be going nuts? This can't be a good sign.

sofixa• 5 years ago

Does anyone why housing everywhere seems to be going nuts? This can't be a good sign.

It will depend on the location, but usually a mix of more people in the big cities, inflation, low interest rates ( so low mortgage rates), physical constraints ( most cities can't sprawl forever), sometimes regulations ( like zoning).

It's mostly in big cities though, go to a small one without any obvious geographic advantage ( like being on the seaside), and prices are usually much lower and stagnating.

Also depending on location, IMHO the pandemic has shown to a lot of people that remote work is possible and can be productive, so there will be some moves towards smaller cities and villages + remote working for big city businesses.

StavrosK3• 5 years ago

That makes sense, thanks. I expected prices in the big city to drop too in the pandemic (at least because of a drop in tourism), but, if anything, they've gone up...

mixmastamyk3• 5 years ago

This is how it happens in California, do many of these happen in Europe?

- Populations are growing.

- Younger folks would rather live in the city.

- Sets of homeowners and voters heavily overlap.

- Government supports homeowners via tax policy, all housing is already taken.

- Existing homeowners prevent new construction.

- Some portion of renters enjoying rent control also support NIMBY policies.

A perfect recipe for housing scarcity and therefore high prices.

StavrosK3• 5 years ago

If anything, populations here are declining, the set of voters is basically "everyone", or near enough, owning a home isn't particularly supported? Though not discouraged either, there is quite a bit of new construction, but on the outskirts of the city (as happens usually), and there are no rent-control policies.

This is why I'm mystified as to what's driving prices up, I've heard things like increasing tourism making owning a home a good investment, foreigners buying homes to get citizenship (a "golden passport"), and foreigners trying to spend their unlaundered fortunes abroad.

dilyevsky2• 5 years ago

Probably many reasons but my understanding is economies globally becoming more mature/competitive -> loans are issued at lower interest bc things are more stable and also businesses require more capital to reach profitability -> near-zero interest increases purchasing power + more money flow into assets bc saving cash is now viewed as bad -> housing, shitcoins andstonks are going up and to the right

jokethrowaway3• 5 years ago

House prices in Europe are generally incredibly overrated (especially if you compare value/rent ratio with property in the USAs), I think it's partially explained by some cultural reasons, by the economic crisis of 2008 (for a long time buying a house has consistently been a great move) and lack of real estate housing (which is half lack of space, half government manipulating the market through various initiatives and regulations).

More recently, pent-up demands after a covid induced slow down, temporary government incentives, increased risk of currency devaluation, markets, gold (heck, even cryptocurrencies) at all time highs.

Once the economic damage of the pandemic is factored in, small businesses die and the middle class start being taxed even more, I'd expect the market to react negatively as people with money flee.

Probably at some point after lockdowns are over (if they will be over at some point) and governments start taxing real estate purchases again (some countries reduced taxation to push the housing market up).

sbarre• 5 years ago

There has been a growing trend in the last ~10 years for large international REITs (Real Estate Income Trusts - basically corporations purpose-built to own rental housing) to buy up housing in cities where they see an opportunity for arbitrage.

These are billion-dollar companies that can buy dozens of buildings at a time.

So while before the rental housing busioness was much more decentralized and more locally owned (with exceptions obviously), now we're seeing big organized international corporate operations coming in and buying up stock and optimizing operations to maximize profits to the maximum extent of local laws, and running things arm's length and without any real thought to the fact that these are people's homes, and probably shouldn't be treated with "maximum efficiency".

Popular tactics such as "renovictions" are used to get rid of rent-protected legacy tenants, and a (literal) fresh coat of paint is applied to old buildings to then rent at "market rates" which just means the maximum the market can bear.

ZephyrBlu• 5 years ago

I have to ask, why did you create a website analytics company?

It seems extremely commoditized at this point with multiple competitors who have strong positioning (I.e. privacy focused, open source, etc).

gjvnq• 5 years ago

Why not use some sort of fauxopen license?

Let anyone read the code and run it but only for testing and hobby purposes.

This would be like offering a trial version with the advantage that people can easily offer tiny fixes and letting people make changes for their particular use cases.

KajMagnus5• 5 years ago

Check out the Business Source License: https://mariadb.com/bsl-faq-adopting/,

and maybe: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroach... "Why We're Relicensing CockroachDB [under the Business Source License]"

Also, the Fair Source license: https://fair.io

m3nu• 5 years ago

nothing makes people disappear faster from a GitHub thread than asking them if they want to contribute the code changes themselves.

Sad, but true. Everyone wants good software but very few users are willing to contribute anything. Even if it's just to test an unreleased version.

I think open source projects need to think more about their "funnel" that turns users into contributors. Even if it's just for minor tasks, like docs, translation or testing.

jokethrowaway3• 5 years ago

From what I can see businesses either need OSS to attract / retain developers and put someone to maintain their OSS projects or they just equate OSS with abandonware that has a chance to make us look cool.

Don't get me wrong, having companies do OSS is much better than having unpaid developers ruining their sleep and coding 4 more hours after their daily shift.

Still, I don't think it's a great reason to not do OSS. I can name soo many projects open sourced by companies where nobody bothered to merge my PRs or answer issues.

The reason I wouldn't open source my business is for a later stage, when I actually have a profitable business and AWS/other giants will clone it and sell it instead of me.

wpietri• 5 years ago

Good stuff! A software business is a business first. But for engineers, it's easy to think software is the most important part.

Why I Didn't Open-Source My Second SaaS

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