For example, many of us use Calendly. There are many for-profit Calendly alternatives. Could we band together and create an open-source, truly free Calendly alternative where users split hosting costs in a fair way? The cost for functionality would go down to pennies per user, since no one expects to make a profit. I don't necessarily want to take on the whole burden of self-hosting an open-source platform, but would be happy to pay for usage if those funds only go towards keeping the platform online.
Just curious if some such experiment has been successful, or perhaps why they fail.
Problem is that all parts of this process needs funding, which makes it difficult to make work. Someone needs to run the physical infrastructure, someone needs to operate the paas platfrom, someone needs to develop/maintain the paas platform codebase, someone needs to develop the actual applications, and someone needs to maintain the application packaging/deployment stuff. And all those someones should somehow get fair market-rate compensation for the work they do.
One way of providing compensation is to hand out credits for the service, but in practice it is probably infeasible to make the numbers really work out. And even if all the labor is compensated through service credits, you still need actual real money flowing in to pay for colo and hardware etc, which probably needs to come from the otherwise non-contributing userbase.
Not saying it is completely impossible thing to accomplish, but it is really difficult to bootstrap, and almost as difficult to keep running sustainability, especially when individual people inevitably come and go.
As for the Calendly alternative instance - have you heard of cal.com? It's free for individuals.
I recently wrote this article featuring their origin story: <https://blog.scoutflo.com/cal-com-the-coolest-open-source-al...>
It's a natural extension of Framasoft, where they opened up their concept so that they were not a single point of failure.
The providers are almost exclusivey based in Europe currently[2], likely due to the French origins of Framasoft. But there's no reason it has to stay thay way.
[1] https://www.chatons.org/ [2] https://www.chatons.org/search/near-me
Running a SaaS reliably involves a lot more than just the open source app.
Who's going to handle DevOps and Security, product road map, paying for hosting, transactional emails, etc.
A SaaS is a business, has expenses, needs revenue.