41–50 of 62 posts
Hey! This is awesome! Great job :-) I make Beekeeper Studio, another open source db tool (although v different), we started charging for a pro version 2 years ago. Would be cool to connect! I can tell you what we did and what did and didn't work - Matthew (at) beekeeperstudio (dot) io
What you have built can definitely become a product supporting you with a very nice income. Free version can stay free but you can sell solo licenses and team licenses as subscriptions. Paid license users will also have your support - and that matters to companies.
As others have said, commercial features can be built on top of the OSS product, like Electron desktop client, support for more databases, for views/procedures etc.
There is no downside to trying to commercialize this. Whoever wants to use what you have built so far can continue and I guarantee that many companies would be happy to give you $50/month for a more advanced version with support.
(edit for typo)
1. Allow for adjusting grid spacing and grid point size.
2. I can't seem to find a snap-to-grid option (e.g., a magnet icon).
3. Allow docking of the sidebar to the left or right of the screen.
4. When the sidebar is hidden, the popover does not include tabs for Relationships, Subject Areas, and Notes. It would be nice to have those available.
5. Allow sidebar width customization in pixel size or percentage
If it doesn't cost you much money you should keep it free and maybe sell an advanced version aimed at companies.
There are already similar things like this in the market, you could easily create an advanced version by adding paid AI prompts that generate code.
I own and run a DevOps consulting company and if you have interest I may be able to assist you getting the hosted platform up and running. It is built currently to be multi-tenant with projects/organizations and users supported? Gonna need single sign-on support as well.
Initial disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
Your project is using AGPL, without a CLA, and you have third-party contributors. If I understand correctly, this essentially prevents anyone from having an enhanced closed-source version (SaaS or otherwise) of your product -- even you. Although you created it, you only own the copyright for your own portion of the code. Third party contributors own the copyright for their contributions, which are equally subject to the terms of the AGPL for everyone.
So if you wanted to monetize an enhanced version, you have two options, if I understand correctly:
A) Keep the enhanced version entirely open source. You can charge for a hosted version but users must be able to self-host. Obvious downside: this leads to weird misaligned incentives where your revenue can depend on your project being difficult to install/host.
or
B) Obtain a licensing agreement from all third-party contributors since the time you switched to AGPL, or completely re-write any code where you can't get that agreement. Might not be practical.
You could try alternative monetization methods that don't rely on an enhanced version, such as support contracts or sponsored development of new features, but these are hard to scale... especially since a decent number of tech companies have a blanket ban on using AGPL projects that aren't dual-licensed.
This isn't to say AGPL is bad, just that it's a nuanced topic. There are lots of blog posts out there about the monetization implications, for example here's one from the cofounder of GitLab: https://www.opencoreventures.com/blog/agpl-license-is-a-non-...
Just for the context, I've been making (and selling) database (migration/translation) tools for 20-ish years. What you have built can definitely become a product supporting you with a very nice income. Free version can stay free but you can sell solo licenses and team licenses as subscriptions. Paid license users will also have your support - and that matters to companies. As others have said, commercial features can…
Just for the context, I've been making (and selling) database (migration/translation) tools for 20-ish years. What you have built can definitely become a product supporting you with a very nice income. Free version can stay free but you can sell solo licenses and team licenses as subscriptions. Paid license users will also have your support - and that matters to companies. As others have said, commercial features can…
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This looks a lot like ChartDB[0]. Is that correct? If so, how would you compare the two tools, or better yet, distinguish yours from theirs? [0] https://github.com/chartdb/chartdb
hehe mine was up and running way before theirs. but we have diverged quite a bit. might be biased but i think mine is easier to jump right in. mine is more like the draw.io of database editors while theirs is the miro, yk?
It seems like your project is more grassroots than theirs, so hopefully you can use it to make some money... Not sure how your platform works, but do you provide (paid) storage, syncing, multi-user collaboration, etc.? That seems like the predictable monetization strategy.
The examples look quite nice though.