HACKER Q&A
📣 armagon

Fill a niche with open source of a for-profit product?


I've found a niche.

I was thinking of making an open-source project and scratch my own itch, and make it available for others.

It occurred to me that people in this niche -- most who work as hobbyists, although there are some professionals -- regularly spend money on materials, so there might be a money-making opportunity here.

Some downsides, though, to attacking it as a money-making opportunity: - open-source projects feel collaborative while money-making opportunities seem to be antagonistic [in broad strokes, anyway] - while I'm a fine coder, I have poorly developed business, marketing, and sales skills - people expect real support for something they've paid for, even if they only pay a dollar; that expectation is different for free software (and, more to the point, I don't know that I can put in enough time to support it to that level) - conceivably I could make the product open-source and for sale; I just think that'd deter people from contributing (and I'd probably need a thing for them to sign before helping out, which I know for a fact deters people) - the audience is smaller, much like far fewer people will try out a paid game than will try a free-to-play game

Some upsides: - some people are more comfortable getting software through stores than downloading something off of the internet, and, who knows, may be willing to pay

I hear the words "why not both" in my head, but I'm not sure how to pull that off.

Anyways, I'm just putting this out here to ask for some advice.

  👤 smoldesu Accepted Answer ✓
You've been pretty vague so far, so it's hard to offer concrete advice. A few thoughts, though:

>I hear the words "why not both" in my head, but I'm not sure how to pull that off.

In my time working with open source, I have found only one good way to monetize an open source project: hosting. Keep it simple: users can pay $x/month to access your service on your servers, or they can host it themselves for free. If you really want to turn up the heat, offer direct support tickets and feature requests for your paid users, but do not pull punches on your self-hosted version. Ideally, you can have your cake and eat it too: software like Grafana and Obsidian.md have gotten away with this for a while, and they've seen the benefits of both open-source and business customers. It's a beautiful thing, if you can pull it off.

👤 tapiok
There is a new approach to solve this problem. An application called Rovas allows you to go the middle way; make a payment mandatory, but allow people to pay with their own volunteer time. This way you will not exclude anybody and folks who do not want to (report) volunteer work, can still pay you in national currency (experience so far suggests, that most do). Check https://rovas.app/rules for more info.
👤 PaulHoule
When is the last time you bought software in a store?

Muggles use gmail, muggles download apps from the App Store. They might find a 15 year old copy of Backyard Basketball from Ollie’s Discount Store but they lack the mad skills, if not the optical drive to run it, never mind in stall it.

GameStop lumbers on because day traders are bored, I guess somebody bought a BluRay the other day that is really a big Java applet. Maybe you can get physical media for Win 11 but most people will never need it.