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Hello! In an effort to support the open source community, we’ve curated 200+ open source alternatives to tools that businesses require in day-to-day operations.
Some of these "open source" options are not really open source. - Outline uses the Business Source License 1.1, which eventually becomes open source (Apache 2) four years after each release. https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE - Invoice Ninja uses Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2), which allows you to host it for yourself, but not for other people. https://github.com/invoiceninja/invoiceninja/blob/master/LI…
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I think a good way to get an understanding of this is to start a company yourself. You’ll quickly learn why businesses make the decision to pay for software instead of cobbling together open source. Let’s say you’re a small, but growing company doing $2M ARR. You absolutely could run your email marketing using an open source tool hooked up to Amazon SES and save a thousand bucks a month over something like Mailchimp.…
> If it wastes 8 hours of employee time per month, that’s another $1k a month lost… it’ll require expensive developer time (likely costing the company $1000-$1500/day per engineer all-in) That's not universally true, of course. That money would buy you a week of developer time in most of Europe, and even a month of developer time in some developing economies.
Most SaaS offerings without free tiers indeed are unlikely to be used.
I even had to buy the JetBrains tools myself to be able to navigate 1M SLoC Java codebases easily, refactor with confidence, whilst not resorting to piracy like some of my countrymen do. Even if definitely worth it, i still had to look at the price tag for a while, seeing as it's essentially food for a month or two: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#personal?billing=yearly
Developer salaries vary wildly over the world, though i guess some SaaS solutions also do location based pricing, which may or may not have historically worked.
Everytime I look into B2B software space (I am a complete outsider, btw), I see that here and there always pop up some new company, offering something similar to competitors and what can be stiched together using open source (and almost free, not counting the support) tools. How these companies thrive? Why customers keep buying new stuff, when there are solutions already to most of the business neeeds out there (and…
Not enough resources? I work as a sysadmin in an org that highly prefers self-hosting (paid or non-paid, doesn't really matter). I spend a fairly considerable amount of time on updating services, updating plugins for our services, making sure backups work, integrating our SSO, testing updates on non-live environments etc etc. You can't just set it and forget it. When you approach a dozen or so self-hosted projects, y…
Some managers/owners seemingly don't mind spending $4,000+/m in payroll to chase $2,000/m savings in paid services, though, for whatever reason.
I say, just pay the $$-$$$/month for each thing, and be done with it. If paying for the service isn't worth it, paying someone to manage the tool internally almost certainly isn't, either, so prefer attempting to do without it over that option.
[EDIT] obviously, this can change with scale. If you're a huge company then putting an average of 1/4 of the hours for five sysadmins to managing a self-hosted chat tool can absolutely save you lots of money over paying for one—provided the reliability's at least as good. A small slip on that and you're back on the wrong side of things.
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Interesting, I've always worked at places that prefer to pay someone else for the trouble and use a ton of third-party tools for all the things. In the end, do you think the self-hosting route is worth all the trouble and costs?
It's certainly cheaper to have a couple of sysadmins, but then again, it depends on how valuable is the stuff you're dealing with. Small web agency? Probably not. Supporting dozens of journalists (like my org)? Absolutely. There are also trade-offs. A few sysadmins can't host emails against hostile (sometimes state-sponsored) parties like Google can. We can't roll out a better messaging service than Signal. We could…
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> That money would buy you a week of developer time in most of Europe That's only true if you live in Poland and also ignore the all-in cost of your employees. A good rule of thumb is to assume 2-3x salary for the all-in cost of having a workforce.
In Germany, the average Software Dev salary is about 50k€/year. That's a total payroll cost of about 60k€/year after taxes, social security etc., so around 300€/workday. Add some money for office space, equipment, overhead, etc, and adjust by factor of two in either direction depending on location and role. Of course if you hire a freelancer, prices are very different and 1500€/day is very reasonable.
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This is where the maxim of open source being 'free as in puppies not free as in beer/lunch' comes from. I started my career in open source and still strongly believe in FOSS tenets, but enterprises are looking more to de-risk their projects and platforms. Risk is reduced when you have a vendor you can hold accountable for issues in the product, hence making proprietary solutions (and sometimes open source but wrapped…
Any luck holding Microsoft, Google or Apple accountable for issues in their operating systems?
For example: a large organization might get a "Microsoft Custom Support Agreement" if they want to get security updates after the date that MS stops providing security updates.
As with any negotiation, if you have leverage (i.e. dollars), you can negotiate.