Out of curiosity, who else did it besides RedHat ( who are building Linux distros AFAIK ) ?
How do you expect people to bootstrap an infra SaaS? I just don’t see how you can seriously attempt something like an Auth0 competitor startup without any money.
I mean it’s nice to not take VC money but you are going to be broke for a long long time - and you still have the same failure rate as with VC.
So you need to be super masochistic to work for nothing for years with a 99% of everything will evaporate at any point - and at the same time somehow convince companies to build on your stack - not only build on it but make it the gatekeeper and front door of everything.
I can tell you that you will have an extremely hard time to get any customers for this, regardless of how great the tech is.
Maybe you don’t need it at seed stage - but unless you are fantastically rich already you need some investment to get beyond seed stage IMHO.