Building an Open-Source Suite for SMBs –– Is It Worth the Effort?

Question

Hey all, I'm planning to create a set of open source tools for small medium businesses, like a project management, a task tracker, an ERP, a CRM, and a social media scheduler and much more...I've tried Odoo and Zoho, but they weren't quite what I needed. (it's too buggy and user experience sucks.)I've already got designs & ideas for what these tools should look like. What do you think about building your own tools instead of using ready-made ones?1. What features would you really want in these tools? 2. Have you built or used self-hosted tools before? What was your experience? 3. What are some things I should watch out for when building my own tools?Any advice or suggestions would be super helpful!Thanks a lot!

solardev · Accepted Answer

None of the SMBs I've worked with would want to self-host something like that. It's too business-critical yet not core enough to warrant that sort of engineer time in regards to setup, maintenance, security, etc. They'll usually mix and match hosted services like ClickUp, Airtable, Sprout, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, etc. along with whatever in-house or domain-specific things they use.
It's like asking them to self-develop LibreOffice and GIMP instead of just using MS Office and Adobe. High risk, high cost (in time), and pretty much no advantage over a reasonable SaaS price that's usually in the tens to hundreds of dollars a month.
-------
On the other hand, you can always do a hybrid model where the software (or just its core features) are open source, but you offer a hosted cloud version for most users and only offer enterprise/compliance people the self-hosted version for mucho $$$. That's how Atlassian used to do it.

nullindividual · Answer

Why would SMB care about open source in the solution they choose? SMBs are the least likely to self-host given the costs of hosting. They will go for SaaS (or otherwise MSP-managed services, which often resell SaaS) where possible.