HACKER Q&A
📣 samsquire

Is there a market for community revenue sharing bootstrapping?


I read the post about being paid for open source and how they took a page from the SaaS handbook to create a pricing page and offer add-on services

I feel getting people to pay for things is extremely difficult if you have zero experience building a product.

On one hand you have people that are highly resistant to paying for things: perhaps organisational culture, not having resources or not wanting or being capable of spending money or not having permission. In my experience of reading about Software developers they prefer not to pay for the tools they use. Generalisation.

If I had to pay for my open source stack, it would be expensive because of the value provided.

So my idea is why isn't there a company that provides payment services that offers expensive software in return for a proportion of revenue?

You could have a community website that was pay-as-you-go that offered payments integration for automatic collection of revenue.

The idea being, build your side project with us and you'll pay as you go

The company would be designed around a scalable architecture that can handle rapid growth. You rely on clients to drive revenue and you win.

  👤 orbz Accepted Answer ✓
Invoicing on proportion of revenue is _hard_, and often times comes down to having to accuse and audit the customers frequently. It also presents issues with billing period. Are you billing monthly or annually? Does that frequency match up with the customer’s billing cycle?

Like it or not, per seat and usage based pricing for SaaS ends up being a great proxy for value provider and scales with customer growth.

👤 _448
> why isn't there a company that provides payment services that offers expensive software in return for a proportion of revenue?

I can think of few reasons:

0. For small to medium size companies this will be a financial logistics nightmare. Sending portion of your revenue to some other country will be difficult.

1. For larger companies, they will just pay rather than doing the revenue dance.

2. Companies that pay expect first class support, they will not pay for ad-hoc support system. Providing timely and quality software support is very hard.