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

indiehackers.com

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

#141

Post by nemiah »

imhoguy wrote: post #130
twodave wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly--Having a fleet of client-side machinery open to the Internet sounds like a larger overall risk footprint than having one hosted solution. I'm guessing a bit part of this is just customer psychology and lack of education.

Why do you think it is opened to the Internet? May be just a box behind a NAT calling home and/or be part of closed VPN swarm. I would love to hear how the management part got implemented.

The management works like this:

Every open3ABox has an open websocket connection to my server. I do the monitoring over this connection and for updates and support I tell the box over the websocket connection to forward a port via ssh to my server. The port will be automatically closed by the open3ABox after three hours.

This means no constantly open port and an encrypted connection where only my server is allowed to do a remote function execution (get monitoring values, open port, etc.) on the box.

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

#142

Post by nemiah »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #72
ThinkBeat wrote: post #61

No. You sell additional premium extension to provide needed left out of the open-source offering. You sell cloud hosting and on prem hosting. There is nothing at all wrong with that. That you have built a business where you make a living from software you wrote is awesome. I wish I could.

Given that the main software is AGPL, the extensions would also be open source.

Yes, the extensions are AGPL also.

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

#143

Post by nemiah »

koonsolo wrote: post #60

I wonder how much benefit there was from open sourcing the project: in other words, how many contributors helped out, or how many customers would refuse to buy it when it's not open source. Asking this because sometimes I also wonder if I should open source my project, but I have my doubts on how much you can gain from it (apart from the nice feeling of contributing to open source ;))

Sometimes a client sends me some code to put in my version for future updates. But other than that, I don't work with contributions.

It's more the feeling for me, yes :)

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

#144

Post by nemiah »

kgwgk wrote: post #44

Potential next episode: someone is taking advantage of my open source software, it's getting harder to sell it and earn a living.

I don't see that happening. They would have to offer support for the new product and most of my marketing is word of mouth nowadays. Should work out just fine ;)

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

#145

Post by echelon »

yboris wrote: post #91
mraza007 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty cool product. I have a very similar product but my question is that how did you convinced the users to pay for the product if its already free

It's not "free" in the sense that there's a download button for it. 99.9% of the people wouldn't be readily able to build the app from source. Given I've spent 3 years building it, I feel comfortable selling it for this price. When I first released the app I didn't have the source code available; so it's more like a "commercial product" with the source code available if anyone is interested.

Have you ever thought about charging more?

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

#147

Post by nemiah »

christogreeff wrote: post #21
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #8

The demo site is in German; a language selector is not obviously findable. It’s also excruciatingly slow to load! “Let the software speak for itself” - well, it did - if I were evaluating invoicing software I’d go look elsewhere mainly based on this very poor first impression. Could certainly use some optimization / speed up.

You might need to consider that she didn't intend for HN volumes of traffic. Also, it loaded fine for me.

Nope, I did not ;)

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

#148

Post by nemiah »

scbrg wrote: post #15
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the blog article is in English and it was promoted in an English site (hacker news :)

The "blog" article is in English because it's posted in an English speaking community (who are presumably more interested in the story than the software itself). It's "promoted" on HN by someone other than the author, it seems.

No, wasn't me. I actually decided against posting the link here.

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

#149

Post by orangeshark »

okprod wrote: post #123
fsflover wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both, i.e. FLOSS.

No, it's not both. Open source is a business model. AGPL is a free software license. Look at Wikipedia, or ask the license holder, the FSF.

It is both. Here[0] is GNU comparing them. The Open Source Initiative also has their definition[1] of Open Source.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

[1] https://opensource.org/osd

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

#150

Post by yboris »

echelon wrote: post #145
yboris wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "free" in the sense that there's a download button for it. 99.9% of the people wouldn't be readily able to build the app from source. Given I've spent 3 years building it, I feel comfortable selling it for this price. When I first released the app I didn't have the source code available; so it's more like a "commercial product" with the source code available if anyone is interested.

Have you ever thought about charging more?

It's scary. I sell about 120 copies per month. I suspect charging more will drop it down to fewer than 100 copies. I'd rather more people use the app.

I will be working on adding facial recognition; I might have a pricier option for facial recognition features perhaps.

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