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

#1

Post by neya » Mon, May 13, 2024, 8:39 AM UTC

I am curious as to how do you solve the problem of maintaining different offerings of your product.

1) Do you have two separate codebases for free and paid? Or do you have some sort of standard workflow where you have two different branches? 2) How do you handle updates to your product? 3) How about employee access?

Thanks in advance!

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

#2

Post by throwaway11460 » Mon, May 13, 2024, 9:15 AM UTC

Base platform with extension support, core functionality as well as paid additions are extensions.

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

#3

Post by anonzzzies » Mon, May 13, 2024, 10:12 AM UTC

Many of these products are fully source-available, just different directories live under different licenses. That seems the easiest way.

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

#4

Post by ezekg » Mon, May 13, 2024, 9:16 PM UTC

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 only instance of the EE edition in multiplayer mode (other EE customers are entitled to singleplayer only).

I've been running this set up for about a year [1] and it's working well. Having a single code base was a requirement before I made the project fair source [2]; the fair source ELv2 license lets me add feature gates to facilitate this, while protecting me from forks giving away EE features for free (while still allowing forks).

Updates are pushed to the SaaS offering daily. I cut self-hosted releases bi-annually unless it's for a critical fix.

[0]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api

[1]: https://keygen.sh/blog/all-your-licensing-are-belong-to-you/

[2]: http://fair.io/

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

#5

Post by scottcha » Mon, May 13, 2024, 10:10 PM UTC

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…

Couple of questions: 1. You link to fair.io but it seems there isn't a latest license there only a legacy version. Do you know what the current status is on what seems like a pending version update?

2. Your project repro actually links to the elastic license. Is there some relation between the two? Do you prefer the fairsource license over the elastic license>

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

#6

Post by peignoir » Mon, May 13, 2024, 10:22 PM UTC

on our end the core is open sourced, we keep the saas backend closed.

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

#7

Post by elieskilled » Mon, May 13, 2024, 10:22 PM UTC

You can have open source and still charge for it. For example, getinboxzero.com or posthog.com or cal.com. Many others too.

Projects use different licenses for enterprise and regular features. Cal does that for example.

Novu doesn’t commit their enterprise features to their codebase. And they symlink those features in. Their project is all MIT because of this.

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

#8

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 13, 2024, 10:56 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#9

Post by simonw » Mon, May 13, 2024, 10:57 PM UTC

Plugins!

My SaaS version of https://datasette.io is the open source version plus 76 plugins. Almost all of those plugins are themselves open source, with just a few that aren't for features that are unique to the SaaS product - things like showing how much disk space the user has used up already.

Here's what that custom plugin looks like, it's pretty thin: https://gist.github.com/simonw/114131fd9c1826f3629cc3b3dcb84...

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

#10

Post by jbarham » Mon, May 13, 2024, 11:19 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #9

Plugins! My SaaS version of https://datasette.io is the open source version plus 76 plugins. Almost all of those plugins are themselves open source, with just a few that aren't for features that are unique to the SaaS product - things like showing how much disk space the user has used up already. Here's what that custom plugin looks like, it's pretty thin: https://gist.github.com/simonw/114131fd9c1826f3629cc3b3dcb84.…

I think that should be https://datasette.io/