Placemark is going open source and shutting down

https://macwright.com/2023/11/13/placemark

by Tomte • 3 years ago

565 131 3 years ago

wcerfgba• 3 years ago

Thank you for committing to release it all as open source, instead of hoarding it or putting it in the bin like so many other services do when they fail to achieve sustainability.

wslh• 3 years ago

Since major of startups fail, isn't it a good idea for a startup to commit to this at the beginning? Even privately to not disalign the success goal. If they don't commit to this it is zillion times worst than technical debt.

Fnoord• 3 years ago

Colin Percival's Tarsnap famously has such mechanic (though not a startup). It ensures you wouldn't fall into some kind of bus problem. However, it creates an incentive where the general public has an incentive to see the product fail. I word it like that because from my PoV the general public has a net benefit from F(L)OSS. I suppose that is why people prefer to keep such secret.

But hopefully not before it is too late. We should all think about situations where we are no longer around. Like having your keys/passwords at a notary.

narinxas• 3 years ago

it depends, many startups whole purpose for getting founded is getting acquihired, if this the case, then clearly the answer is no

dyeje• 3 years ago

It’s a lot of work to set something up for being a sustainable, usable OSS project. It certainly doesn’t make sense to invest time in it upfront when your goal is to sell access to it. Afterwards, founders have usually poured everything they have into trying to make the business survive and the work is just unappealing.

bdcravens3• 3 years ago

Perhaps, but many startups do leverage paid products and components, leaving the open-source product nonfunctional (without a user paying those same licenses). To suggest that the company has an obligation to only use OSS is not reasonable.

jojobas• 3 years ago

What's the incentive? Startups are created to earn founders money, at least in the form of wages off funding or ideally when acquired/listed. Pledging to open source doesn't work towards that goal.

remram• 3 years ago

A commitment is probably not worth much when the entity who committed literally doesn't exist anymore.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

isn't it a good idea for a startup to commit to this at the beginning?

The source code is part of a startup’s IP. When a startup fails the IP goes to the investors and debtors who can try to recoup some of their investment by selling the IP.

By the time a company fails, the source code isn’t really theirs to give away any more. They have to hand it over to investors. It’s the same reason a failing startup can’t just give away all of their office furniture or other assets.

Even if we ignore that, releasing source code doesn’t actually do anything for most customers of a SaaS platform. They were paying for the service, not the source code. The source code wasn’t designed for individual use, so self-hosting isn’t going to make sense. Maybe some other group would try to run a company around it, but if the first company failed to become sustainable with the source code it’s less likely that a second company would.

stared• 3 years ago

"Just open source it" is not always a viable option. IP can be locked for one or the other reason, and it is not always in the power of founders to release it.

Doctor_Fegg• 3 years ago

PSA - the HN article submitter ("Tomte") is not Placemark's author (Tom MacWright) despite the three matching letters.

michaelcampbell• 3 years ago

Tom M seems to not like HN, so this makes sense.

https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news

dudul2• 3 years ago

OTOH this whole "I didn't value your service enough to pay for it, but now that you failed and open sourced it I'll jump on it" attitude is kind of annoying.

I can absolutely understand startup founders who are a bit spiteful and don't want to give away for free what nobody was interested in buying from them.

Ensorceled• 3 years ago

It's better for your mental health to instead think "well, at least my loyal, paying customers who believed in me have a path".

andybak• 3 years ago

Maybe the pricing is off?

There's lots of things I'd use at $n but wouldn't use at $10n

And the corollary of this - if open source didn't exist, the result wouldn't be me paying for lots more products - it would be using lots less products.

Certainly - the advent of paywalls has meant that I mainly don't read those sources. Even the more affordable ones come with a mental tax of deciding to subscribe/cancel, remembering to renew/cancel etc...

cableshaft• 3 years ago

The first time I've heard of it is today so I can't really have ever given them money to begin with.

But I'd be curious to see the source once it's released, for sure.

nextaccountic• 3 years ago

Open source code is inherently more dependable than proprietary code, in that if the maintainer quits and this tool is crucial for your business, if it's open source you can maintain it yourself (or if it's used by multiple parties, they can pool together to keep maintaining it)

I myself am not interested on any proprietary offerings at this point; this has no relation to any qualities of the proprietary product. It could be awesome for all I know

Aeolun• 3 years ago

I think there’s a lot of people that’ll happily install it if it’s open source, and then do absolutely nothing with it. The same people wouldn’t pay $20/month for the same privilege.

The people to whom it is valuable are already paying.

senderista• 3 years ago

How many open-sourced codebases from failed startups have succeeded as open-source projects? Can you name a single one?

Wolfbeta• 3 years ago

Blender

l0b0• 3 years ago

Netscape Navigator, which became Mozilla, which became Firefox.

miohtama• 3 years ago

OpenOffice

tantalic• 3 years ago

Parse (https://parseplatform.org)

prerok• 3 years ago

Would Godot count?

dylmye• 3 years ago

Actual Budget (https://actualbudget.org) - I'm not connected to them but I use their software on a daily basis and it's still well maintained.

apollo1213• 3 years ago

https://www.chatwoot.com/

timeon• 3 years ago

It looks like nice tool. Shame it didn't work out in the end.

sccxy• 3 years ago

macwright.com domain redirects to google.com for me.

Better source: https://www.placemark.io/post/placemark-is-winding-down

SushiHippie• 3 years ago

Because of this script tag....

  <script>try {
      if (document.referrer) {
        const ref = new URL(document.referrer);
        if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') {
          window.location.href = 'https://google.com/';
        }
      }
    } catch (e) { }
  </script>

maccard• 3 years ago

https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news - seems intentional

emi2k01• 3 years ago

That's interesting. I think I read about this website redirecting HN users before.

I can't trigger that redirect on Firefox or Chromium browsers, though. It seems HN puts a `noreferrer` on the link.

mthoms• 3 years ago

Am I the only one who sees this kind of thing as childish and petty? I mean... get over yourself.

Edit: After reading the reasoning at https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news I'm a little more sympathetic, but there's got to be a better way to handle this.

trollied• 3 years ago

Pricing seems strange. $20/user per month. But you'd need someone else to also pay so that you can collaborate. So $40/month minimum? Seems quite a barrier.

reidrac• 3 years ago

It is a very specialised GIS tool, isnt it? So that price doesn't look like a barrier to me. Sounds more like a smaller market with already established tools, perhaps?

I haven't checked if it was the case, but organisation type of license with a pack of users could have worked well.

richardwhiuk• 3 years ago

Maybe, or you end up with "yeah, the placemark login details are in the shared password vault"

Reason077• 3 years ago

"It is a very specialised GIS tool, isnt it?"

I wouldn't call it very specialised. Seems like a fairly general tool for visualising and manipulating GeoJSON and similar data? I actually need to create/manipulate a GeoJSON data set myself for a current project, so I think I'll try this out!

mickael-kerjean• 3 years ago

Building a business around a software is no simple task. You need a lot of 20$ customer to make a leaving and despite the low marginal cost for a user, it's very hard to make people to open their wallet to buy software whereas those same people will go buy expensive servers all the time and won't blink an eye for hardware.

Any chance you could give more info on the size of enterprise customer you were looking at? I've had many people coming to me and only very rarely the rate per hour once you consider everything is more interesting than getting a 9to5 anywhere else.

source: 20% of my income come from sales that relates to my OSS software and I hope one day to get to 100% so I can focus 100% of my time on it

figassis4• 3 years ago

I'm one of the users that is averse to paying even a $10 subscription. The reason is it would be one of the 10-20 subscriptions that are all supposed to be really useful and worth it. For a small startup, this adds up, especially the $10/user one, where now you have to consider all your subscriptions when checking if you have the budget to hire someone new. I with there was a service where I could define a budget, say $500-$1000/month, and pick the services I need from those available on the platform, specify the size of my team, and vendors would bid for this. This service could then provide some form of SSO to these services. You might not get $20/user, but you might get 5%-10% of all the users on this service.

bryanrasmussen2• 3 years ago

So how much would you be willing to pay for that service?

dustingetz2• 3 years ago

a saas is three orders of magnitudes cheaper than a human, in terms of %runway your entire saas budget is like 5 days per year of runway for a 4 person startup. That developer you just hired doesn’t work out? boom in one instant you’re out $50k plus the cumulative time anyone spent spent talking to them. companies will spend huge amounts of money on saas just to get leverage on their 100x higher payroll costs.

type03• 3 years ago

Another problem is that there no way of safeguarding that your SaaS provider won't raise your prices overnight, and migration also costs money and time

Closi• 3 years ago

If you aren’t willing to pay $10 a month for this, frankly you aren’t the customer.

I’m in a small business that pays much more per person for mapping software :)

(10 person team, probably £8k per year spend)

irjustin• 3 years ago

I'm one of the users that is averse to paying even a $10 subscription.

You're not a target customer.

I'm surprised this software is only $20/user-mth. This isn't "general" software. It solves a specific problem for a specific set of customers - it should be charging way more and going the enterprise route.

Terretta2• 3 years ago

Vast majority of subscription pricing is far out of line to software/SaaS cost (not counting venture costs), so apps and web apps have to compete on things other than utility.

You mention a $20 customer. Look at pricing of Google workspaces or Office.

https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...

Version pricing was beneficial to indie builders because users didn't consider the source. (Office still offers that $149 level version pricing.)

Subscription pricing indies try to charge more, often multiples, relative to enterprise incumbents, so anyone who can ship at scale, can make the market unfeasible for indie entrants.

What happens is boutique buyers of indie subs, but not the mass market scale because it's too much to get all the users.

runako2• 3 years ago

Look at pricing of Google workspaces or Office.

This is a common mistake in understanding pricing. The reason Office (or consumer apps like Spotify & Netflix) are able to be relatively cheaper is because their addressable market is vastly larger. Larger markets support lower prices, where the winners still end up earning more revenue.

By contrast, smaller niche markets have fewer potential customers over which to amortize their wares. This means that all things equal, those applications will tend to cost more.

As a reductio thought experiment, consider that anyone can buy Microsoft's newest OS, the product of many tens of billions of dollars of R&D, for less than the cost of a tailored suit. But suppose you needed to buy an OS that would only ever run on 50 devices worldwide, how much do you think that would cost?

dim13• 3 years ago

Another application you discover from reading necrolog.

hiatus• 3 years ago

What is necrolog, a blog for dead SaaS?

paulclinger• 3 years ago

Obituary. necrolog is coming from French and is used in some languages, Russian for example.

bravura• 3 years ago

What's that?

solarkraft• 3 years ago

Thank you, that looks good!

While I appreciate them releasing their stuff at all, why do companies usually also shut down at the same time as they are gaining a really cool differentiator over their competitors?

vikramkr2• 3 years ago

Is that actually a thing? I don't think I've heard of a pattern like that

kristopolous2• 3 years ago

Because people are more willing to be take audacious risks when things look like they will inevitably fail. It gives a sense of freedom to a project.

Giving up is the first step to success. That's when you stop trying and start doing.

perlgeek• 3 years ago

I guess the reasoning goes:

* I can't make enough money out of it

* do I keep this as a side project?

* if yes: development mostly stops

* if no: OK, shut down

* now that I don't fear competition, I can Open Source it

(not commenting on how valid each of these is, which is probably very hard to judge without the founder's perspective).

notpushkin• 3 years ago

I love the Chatwoot success story:

[Chatwoot] was a product we started building in 2017. It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. [...] It was in an inactive mode for around 1 and a half years. Recently we thought of putting it out instead of letting the code to rust. Our idea is to make it something like Gitlab/Mattermost where people can host their own version and we will provide a hosted version for people who don't want to self-host.
After we open-sourced, we received contributions from 30 developers all around the world.

And then they proceeded to raise $1.6 million in seed round.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559139

moklick• 3 years ago

Such a great product! I am sorry that it didn't work out and thanks for open sourcing it!

0xferruccio• 3 years ago

Val (https://val.town), the new project you're working on is super cool!

Been playing around with it for the last couple of months and have been delighted with it :)

ushakov• 3 years ago

Tells more about the founders than the product itself!

cynicalsecurity2• 3 years ago

Looks a bit too ambitious. Was it really necessary to provide collaborative real-time editing? This feature seems way over the top.

I understand every startup wants to have a killer feature which creates unique selling proposition, but this seems like something that probably took way too much effort and wasn't really demanded. But this is only my assumption.

TkTech• 3 years ago

Collaborative UXs are much easier to "get right" then they used to be. There are a great many libraries to help like yjs. We added it to a prosemirror based block editor, including polish like multiple cursors and fun things like that, in less than a week.

cynicalsecurity2• 3 years ago

Awesome! Thanks for the insight.

tmcw4• 3 years ago

That's a fair assumption. There were some customers who benefited from real-time editing, but it was a big tech bet and led to a design that was harder to scale for larger datasets.

traverseda• 3 years ago

My only note is that it would be nice if it was open sourced before the servers shut down, so that if there were any users who were dependent on it they have time to make a transition.

Still, releasing it is already much better than 98% of companies in this space, and I'd definitely be inclined to use other products by this person because of it.

xiaq• 3 years ago

The concern may be that there could be undiscovered vulnerabilities in the service and releasing the source before shutdown could make it easier for malicious actors to discover those vulnerabilities and compromise user data.

tmcw4• 3 years ago

Yes, that's the rationale. A customer has asked about getting access to the source ahead of time and I'll try to make that work.

loceng2• 3 years ago

Fair point. Perhaps if it's such an issue for someone, and they see this news, then they can reach out to Tom to try to remedy it - and perhaps help him test out the open source provided to make sure everything's peachy?

He seems like the type of guy to be willing to reasonable and considerate like this.

chrisdinn• 3 years ago

I’ve used Placemark for well over a year to build custom map-based graphics for torontoverse.com. There are a lot of web apps in this space now, and always QGIS, but I personally felt Placemark struck the right balance between simplicity and power.

Thanks for building it!

tristramg2• 3 years ago

Oh, that’s sad. Placemark was a very nice as it was for collecting geographical objects where the associated data is well structured. This is always a hurdle when integrating the generated data into other systems.

My coop has been working with something resembling to placemark: https://cocarto.com but our business model is not to sell it as a SaaS (which is always very difficult, and requires a lot of capital to reach enough customers) but sell a service to companies and administration around it. That’s why it’s FOSS from the beginning.

type03• 3 years ago

but sell a service to companies and administration around it. That’s why it’s FOSS from the beginning.

This doesn't work for everyone, some startups can't afford to put two thirds of the resources on providing support. I think it's sad that there usually no middle way to structure your business with FOSS in mind.

tristramg2• 3 years ago

I agree. That’s our choice, mostly because of our background as service provider (we usually charge by time) it’s in our comfort zone while we are uncomfortable in marketing and trying to get 1000 recurring paying customers. Everyone is different.

And yes, I’m frustrated that living from doing FOSS is hard. And it is also hard to spend only 1 day/week to do smaller contributions…

type03• 3 years ago

Small companies are often happy with a free tier of a service provided by big corporations. This perverse gatekeeping makes it hard for newcomer startups to compete and just get their foot in a door.

worksonmine2• 3 years ago

It also allows newcomer startups to exploit the free tier and create a business with only time investment.

KolmogorovComp• 3 years ago

I didn’t know about the app but this is a great shutdown post. Clear and to the point, no corporate bs around failure to monetize (the dreaded “macroeconomic environment”, a reasonable period of transition for customers as well as a price discount (free!), and obviously last but not least open-sourcing.

It is the kind of post that would make me trust the founder to become a customer of their next project.

reddalo• 3 years ago

I think he should try selling it to Google. It would nicely integrate in their suite of Docs + Sheets + My Maps.

client4• 3 years ago

Placemark was such a great map editor in a collaborative environment. Sad to see it shut down.

oooyay• 3 years ago

Can someone shed some light on what happens monetarily to bootstrapped company founders? How many of them are offering personal collateral on loans vs some form of angel investing? I'm finding it hard to square open sourcing something if someone just lost decades of savings or the value in their home, so I'm curious if there's some way they're getting funding for their companies that doesn't ruin them if things like this happen. The tone is also very, "I lost dreams but not my livelihood" in many of these statements and I'm curious how.

bdon• 3 years ago

Common situations for founders who describe themselves as bootstrapped:

- doing consulting work on the side

- living off savings

- having a spouse with income

For bootstrapped companies in the software or SaaS space without employees there should be minimal start-up costs compared to say, opening a restaurant. The real loss is opportunity costs: what salary or equity you could have earned as an alternative.

tmcw4• 3 years ago

I did consulting for the first 8 months of development, and then the company roughly broke even for operational costs since day one. I built most things myself which led to lower costs. My main cost was just rent and health insurance, which in America, self-employed, is both expensive and useless. I had savings from working for a decade in tech and minimized other costs. So, lucky position to be in, but also your average startup's monthly burn is enormous compared to what you can do by being scrappy.

qrohlf• 3 years ago

For anyone else who follows along in this domain, there's an interesting competitor in the space I stumbled across recently: https://felt.com/

Pretty nice looking product and robust feature set. Love to see GIS tooling becoming more accessible.

francisofascii• 3 years ago

I am going to a GIS conference and I saw Felt on the list of sessions. Didn't know what it was until now.

victorbjorklund• 3 years ago

Great! I'm sorry it didn't work out!

Shorn• 3 years ago

I wonder how long before a company does this; then the software gains traction because it's open and free, so they re-incorporate and re-license the software.

Or have I not been paying enough attention, and this already happened?

eddy162• 3 years ago

I'd never heard about Placemark yet this fills a gap I've been seeing in the mapping market having worked in local government - data management in ArcGIS is $$$, awful, and limited to a handful of GIS specialists, while Felt has nowhere near the data capabilities like joining and transformations that Placemark has. The real money in mapping is from enterprise & government, which requires a lot of upfront work to sell to. Hopefully other companies in the space (like Scribble Maps, Felt, or Esri via ArcGIS Online) fill in some of the feature gaps left by Placemark.

Placemark is going open source and shutting down

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