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Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

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Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#71

Post by tommoor »

h1fra wrote: post #55
tommoor wrote: post #37

Like many other answers here, Outline [0] has eventually landed on a plugin architecture with a private fork for EE – the paid edition has many extra plugins providing functionality such as extra importers, auth methods, search functionality etc. The interface itself has evolved several times and we're still adding new hooks to enable plugins to integrate with different areas of the product. This approach has really…

Is the public repo the main branch? When you want develop something: you create a PR in the public repo, review, wait for CI, merge to main, wait for CI, finally merge to the fork, wait for CI? I'm always unsatisfied with the number of steps to achieve that (and the total CI time required), but maybe it's unavoidable.

It is, CI times are fairly fast – in reality it's not been too much of a bottleneck but I'd imagine if you had a team working on the private fork you'd probably want to automate the merges from public at the least.

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#72

Post by Msurrow »

ezekg wrote: post #4

I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…

How do you handle conflicting feature requests from two different paying customers? Like customer A wants buttons in the right, customer B wants them on the left.

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#73

Post by mbreese »

atonse wrote: post #34

For our SaaS [1] we have a plug-in architecture. And each plugin has a concept called install constraints. They consist of app, tier, and the role of the user provisioning the account. Based on the right combination, certain plugins get auto installed and the user can enable/disable optional plugins/features. Upon installation, the plug-in module has a “lifecycle” module with callbacks for install, uninstall, after_i…

I love this concept (and I’m probably in that market segment). But, I didn’t see any examples on your landing page. It would be really nice if you had one or two examples to show off what a resulting site would look like.

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#74

Post by spacebanana7 »

jonrosner wrote: post #65

Don't split your codebase. Just add some flags if it is self-hosted or not. Devs here will cry and tell you you can't do that and people can bypass it. Really don't listen to them. 99% of the people who purchase your SaaS instead of self-hosting do it because they don't want the hassle. The rest won't buy from you anyway. The biggest problem is getting SOMETHING out there. If you have success (which let's be honest m…

Also few enterprises are willing to risk openly violating a licence, even if no technical barriers exist.

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#75

Post by ezekg »

Msurrow wrote: post #72
ezekg wrote: post #4

I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…

How do you handle conflicting feature requests from two different paying customers? Like customer A wants buttons in the right, customer B wants them on the left.

I make the choice. I don't really listen to specifics like that from customers. I'm a SaaS, not a consultancy. Instead, I try to fully understand the customer's problem and then provide a solution to it a way that will work for everybody. If it doesn't work for everybody, or is a niche feature, then I probably won't introduce the feature unless I can come up with a way to make it valuable to other customers. Often, the customer doesn't understand the best way to implement something to make it valuable/usable to other customers, or the costs involved i.r.t. to maintenance, but I do.

With an API product, you also have to be picky about new features because once something is introduced, it can't be taken back (assuming you want to maintain backwards compatibility).

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#76

Post by sneak »

jonrosner wrote: post #65

Don't split your codebase. Just add some flags if it is self-hosted or not. Devs here will cry and tell you you can't do that and people can bypass it. Really don't listen to them. 99% of the people who purchase your SaaS instead of self-hosting do it because they don't want the hassle. The rest won't buy from you anyway. The biggest problem is getting SOMETHING out there. If you have success (which let's be honest m…

By this logic, you also should release all of your code as free software under permissive licenses.

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#77

Post by rjhacks »

ezekg wrote: post #4

I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…

Thanks for sharing, such an interesting approach! At my startup we're currently discussing licenses, this is very inspiring. I have a follow-up question!

The reasons for OSS you list include "Bus-Factor", "Longevity", and "Continuity". I'd summarize all of those as "even if they can't do business with [company] anymore, users can continue on" - our customers also say that's very important to them.

... But what if "can continue on" means "need some of those proprietary features"? And you're not there to sell to them anymore? Or you've been acquired by private equity, started charging 10^6x, and users want out? Users aren't allowed to clone the repo, remove your proprietary code, and reimplement it with their own solution, because:

> you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key.

Is this a thing your customers are concerned about? What do you expect them to do in such a scenario?

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#78

Post by insane_dreamer »

ezekg wrote: post #4

I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…

I can confirm this approach works. We've been a satisfied paying keygen customer for 6-7 years, long before keygen was open sourced, and the fact that it is now doesn't change our decision to continue to pay for its use. If you have something that works well and fills a certain need, customers are happy to pay for it so they don't have to give any thought to it and can focus on their own core competency.

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#79

Post by insane_dreamer »

ezekg wrote: post #4

I have a single code base [0] for the self-hosted editions and for the SaaS. I split features up across two editions: community edition (CE) and enterprise edition (EE), and then also two modes: singleplayer and multiplayer (single- vs multi-tenant). The switching is done via environment variables, KEYGEN_EDITION and KEYGEN_MODE. The SaaS offering actually runs the EE edition in multiplayer mode, and is right now the…

I haven't heard of Fair Source before -- is it gaining traction? Did you use the "legacy license" (that is linked to on the website)?

Re: Ask HN: Founders who offer free/OS and paid SaaS, how do you manage your code?

#80

Post by echoangle »

sneak wrote: post #76
jonrosner wrote: post #65

Don't split your codebase. Just add some flags if it is self-hosted or not. Devs here will cry and tell you you can't do that and people can bypass it. Really don't listen to them. 99% of the people who purchase your SaaS instead of self-hosting do it because they don't want the hassle. The rest won't buy from you anyway. The biggest problem is getting SOMETHING out there. If you have success (which let's be honest m…

By this logic, you also should release all of your code as free software under permissive licenses.

This but unironically
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