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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?

#91

Post by pc86 »

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…

Absolutely lovely website you have at https://keygen.sh/

Did you write that as well or outsource it?

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

#92

Post by billy99k »

greenavocado wrote: post #31
ijustlovemath wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you actually protect the CE users from setting the environment variables to activate premium features?

If you are desperate enough to shim it out you're not worth pursuing as a customer

Yes, but this will cost money and resources. Large companies can take this as a loss. Small companies will go out of business

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

#93

Post by insane_dreamer »

ezekg wrote: post #88
insane_dreamer wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the kind words, and for being a long-time customer (whoever you are). :) I need to send your team some shirts!

Thank you for a product that is well designed and thought through. Not a common thing these days.

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

#94

Post by ezekg »

pc86 wrote: post #91
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…

Absolutely lovely website you have at https://keygen.sh/ Did you write that as well or outsource it?

Thanks! I designed and built the website as well.

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

#95

Post by ezekg »

billy99k wrote: post #92
greenavocado wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are desperate enough to shim it out you're not worth pursuing as a customer

Yes, but this will cost money and resources. Large companies can take this as a loss. Small companies will go out of business

In my case, Keygen is a very critical part of a business -- much like billing -- so making sure it's reliable, secure, and well-maintained is paramount. This fact, in and of itself, weeds out most individuals (and businesses) who want to fork and steal, because then maintenance is pushed onto them or onto an untrusted third-party, which has a non-trivial cost for any worthwhile business. Much less risky to just pay the vendor of the software instead of treading through the risky route to save a few bucks.

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

#96

Post by sofixa »

mschuster91 wrote: post #90
spacebanana7 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is precisely what Adobe's model was up to Creative Cloud. Probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of young people, school kids and students, grabbed the CS5/6 keygen off of some warez site, taught themselves how to use Photoshop, and asked later employers to provide them with Photoshop. Nowadays, it's not the case any more as the 20€ or so a month are affordable for a lot of people.

> Nowadays, it's not the case any more as the 20€ or so a month are affordable for a lot of people.

But not to many students or young professionals.

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

#98

Post by dhruvagga »

We recently launched Middleware(https://github.com/middlewarehq/middleware) - Open Source Software for Engineering Analytics. We made an architectural change first of splitting the product into core and non-core features. We put core in one repo and non-core in other repos.

We made the core part open source and our paid offering takes up the rest of the product as addons! So, we maintain only one codebase and avoid the hassle of drifts.

Happy to offer more insight.

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

#99

Post by jamiesonbecker »

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 replied below about our homegrown solution, but this is very cool! I wish it'd existed when we wrote Userify, but we'll definitely plan on it for our next app! Kudos for solving this so elegantly!

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

#100

Post by _mlbt »

sofixa wrote: post #96
mschuster91 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely what Adobe's model was up to Creative Cloud. Probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of young people, school kids and students, grabbed the CS5/6 keygen off of some warez site, taught themselves how to use Photoshop, and asked later employers to provide them with Photoshop. Nowadays, it's not the case any more as the 20€ or so a month are affordable for a lot of people.

> Nowadays, it's not the case any more as the 20€ or so a month are affordable for a lot of people. But not to many students or young professionals.

Photoshop is actually cheaper than Netflix now. ($9.99/mo versus $15.49/mo)

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud.html#pick-a-plan-to-star...

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926

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