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How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

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Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#131

Post by prionassembly »

thewakalix wrote: post #127
prionassembly wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donating money is an act of self-expression. Do learn about effective altruism, cost-effectiveness, impact, etc. but know that it will ultimately reflect your values. Donate to African wildlife if you're fascinated by lions and zebras. I donate to Wikipedia and the archive.org. I practice rational ignorance : I estimate that the costs of learning more about effective charity are far above the costs of doing it wrong.…

Effective altruism isn't opposed to your values. It's about achieving your values as much as possible, given resource constraints. If your values are different from most EAs, then you'll have a different criterion for "effectiveness".

Effective altruism is a value. A practicing Catholic may find the most effective interventions to be against their religion. A less strict Christian may feel that effectiveness overrules religious directives. In any case, you're operating under your values.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#132

Post by _benj »

lenkite wrote: post #126
yboris wrote: post #49

I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria. Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...

Doesn't Plex already provide a desktop app that does this ? https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/

You know, that kind of thinking is usually what deters me from building something, but I've come to realize that I (or HN crowd for that matter) is my customer.

A quick glance at the Plex site vs his shows a different appeal. One is a "Free Movies & TV" something, while the other is "Like YouTube for videos on your computer"

I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way :-) I'm not picking on you or on plex or anything... I'm just wanted to point out how the thinking patter of "but you can do that with [enter FOSS name here]" has been often paralyzing for me.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#133

Post by nemiah »

imhoguy wrote: post #125
antattack wrote: post #9

"I have a free version of open3A which is as useful as possible without any limits but of course it is missing advanced functionality. This version gets full support by me via phone and email." I think that providing support for free version is somewhat unique, however it does make sense - the longer people use her software the more likely they purchase add-on or subscription.

It depends on customer base. This is B2B solution so I assume when she picks up the phone the caller is someone who values own time. That way she can hear about frequent needs of users who don't buy the thing when it lacks some essential feature, also could upsell existing extensions or the boxed version. Customers often have no idea of potential the software offers. Simply it is support+marketing+sales number.

I do this because I'm in it for the long run. Sure, maybe it won't pay off, but my "first directive" is, to get people to use my open3A. If they've put all their data in it and miss some feature in the future it is more probable that they will just buy it from me instead of going through the hassle of moving to another solution. If they have a good support experience that just gives them a better feeling with my software.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#134

Post by yboris »

lenkite wrote: post #126
yboris wrote: post #49

I sell my MIT open source Video Hub App for $5 ($3.50 goes to a cost-effective charity - it's charityware). Over the 3 years it's resulted in over $9000 donated to protect people from malaria. Public: https://videohubapp.com/en/ GitHub: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App Charityware: https://medium.com/@whyboris/charityware-doing-good-with-pro...

Doesn't Plex already provide a desktop app that does this ? https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/

The key feature I wanted for VHA was the ability to scroll through thumbnails without having to be connected to hard drive where videos reside. This is particularly great when you have many external hard drives and/or remote volumes but just want to see if you have a particular video already.

With my app, clicking opens the video with your default video player. At the moment you cannot stream to another device (though it's a feature I'm hoping to add in one day).

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#135

Post by nemiah »

prepend wrote: post #100
yakubin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. There is no link in the article to the zip file. 2. Searching for open3A in duckduckgo brings me to a page that spits out PHP errors and doesn't give me anything. 3. The only way that I now know where the zip file is, is because another commenter linked to it. 4. We've seen companies disguise something as open-source, when it wasn't. 5. Open source is commonly hard-to-sell. So no, it wasn't 10 seconds to verify an…

It definitely could be easier. I searched for “open3A” via Google (not ddg, but if I got errors on ddg, I would try “!open3a”) and the first hit is a German site. I don’t speak German, but I saw the download link [0] and downloaded the first zip and viewed the license. I spent more time downloading the 4mb zip than clicking on stuff. It’s not the author’s job to make answering my questions easy. It is my job to not m…

My intention with this blog post was only to write down my story. No marketing intended :)

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#136

Post by yboris »

prionassembly wrote: post #128
yboris wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efforts work best when they are focused on cost-effective interventions, not things you have direct experience with. Just about 100% of the US population have no experience with malaria. Yet it costs about $2 to provide a insecticide-treated net that protects on average 2 people for 2-3 years from malaria (while they sleep -- a common time for malaria transmission). There is arguably nothing you can do with $2 of res…

Then, it's possible that nets are being distributed by evil people who make their victims kneel for hours before getting help. (This is extreme, but it could involve things diametrically opposed to your values; maybe Islam is being spread in traditional animistic societies[0], destroying traditional culture; maybe they're micro-chipping these people.) Cost-effectiveness is a good metric, but if you know nothing about…

Exactly the reason everyone should do research before giving to charity. Since unlike products you buy, which you can test out and even return, charitable donations provide you with no feedback, you must research charities.

The great news is GiveWell has been doing this for over a decade (full time!) and has excellent recommendations.

https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#137

Post by nemiah »

renewiltord wrote: post #86
yakubin wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. There is no link in the article to the zip file. 2. Searching for open3A in duckduckgo brings me to a page that spits out PHP errors and doesn't give me anything. 3. The only way that I now know where the zip file is, is because another commenter linked to it. 4. We've seen companies disguise something as open-source, when it wasn't. 5. Open source is commonly hard-to-sell. So no, it wasn't 10 seconds to verify an…

Fascinating. I consider myself to have reasonable mastery of my tools and I usually pick good tools for my purposes. Here's a re-enactment of how I detected the license: https://i.imgur.com/Gr4xMT5.mp4 It's near trivially easy.

Funny to see you do that on my website :D

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#138

Post by kfk »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #53

I made a great deal of money for a few years providing training and support for the founders of a popular mature open source project. There's no customer success team for open source software, I don't care how good the community is. A significant chunk of the money charged for my services went back to the founders to continue their work. This is a fantastic model for open source. I encourage more people to connect wi…

This makes sense. I am working with dask and it will become harder to keep this running in our “enterprise” aws setup as it’s open source with no vetted credible support company behind.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#139

Post by nemiah »

scottlamb wrote: post #62

Kudos to the author! I don't get this part: > In 2021 I recently launched my newest product: It's called open3ABox and it's a raspberry pi with open3A pre-installed which I deliver to my customers who have not the technical skills for their own server but don't want a cloud version either. It's fully remote managed and monitored by me more steady income, yay When people object to cloud (SaaS really), I tend to think…

I offer open3ABox this way for the customers that have fewer technical abilities and don't want a cloud service.

They usually use the Windows version but don't do backups and if something fails it's a nightmare to support.

Re: How I earn a living selling my open-source web-based invoicing application

#140

Post by atleta »

davidw wrote: post #118
atleta wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been a usual business model for larger vendors (and servers): selling appliances. Google also did it (I think it was for intranet search), it was also one of the story threads in the Silicon Valley sitcom (see "the box"). When I launched my first startup, I also did something similar. Though we were selling a service: we'd deliver it as a 'box' (my co-founder actually called it 'the box' - before SV was aire…

And having a physical object adds some scarcity into the mix, which you need: https://journal.dedasys.com/2007/02/03/in-thrall-to-scarcity...

In our case it wasn't the point. It was more about the plug and play (literally, since it was a background music service) vs "install and then keep it running all the time". We had a local competitor and funny enough they pitched themselves with saying "you don't need any special hardware". I.e. they didn't get that it was indeed a feature.

But it was an interesting read.

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