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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

#151

Post by echelon »

yboris wrote: post #150
echelon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never had the experience of pricing a product, but my intuition tells me this could be a win. We occasionally see articles on HN that describe how to increase prices without losing your audience.

Perhaps there are others here that can offer feedback and advice.

Research and experiment. If you do embark on this, a postmortem write-up with your learnings would be a great read.

Best of luck with whatever your plans are. It's a cool app!

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

#152

Post by dang »

gnulinux wrote: post #113

ITT: People who didn't read the article, argue how GPL would make this business model impossible, not realizing code in the article is AGPL licensed. smh, I expected better from HN.

The trouble with comments like this is that they make the thread even worse by amplifying what they're complaining about (and adding a layer of meta on top).

It's much better to dampen bad stuff by downvoting/flagging it and/or amplify good stuff by contributing interesting things.

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

#153

Post by yboris »

echelon wrote: post #151
yboris wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never had the experience of pricing a product, but my intuition tells me this could be a win. We occasionally see articles on HN that describe how to increase prices without losing your audience. Perhaps there are others here that can offer feedback and advice. Research and experiment. If you do embark on this, a postmortem write-up with your learnings would be a great read. Best of luck with whatever your plans…

Thank you! For the reference, until I released version 3.0.0 (last November) the price was $3.50 (and all of it went to charity). The number of sales didn't take a hit - but it coincided with some publicity and major improvements to the app.

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

#154

Post by michrassena »

bityard wrote: post #77
tyingq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be a bit wary of something as important as invoices on the Rpi storage though. Hopefully there's some automatic backup.

Every single time the RPi comes up in an HN thread, someone mentions the reliability of SD cards. The truth is: 1) Regular SD cards were never designed to be OS volumes, of course they're going to fail when used for that. Buy better SD cards, like ones with high write endurance. 2) RPi 4 does not need to boot off SD card. It can boot from any USB drive of your choosing, or over Ethernet.

I definitely had this issue with the first generation Raspberry Pi. It wasn't just a corrupted filesystem. The SD card was completely ruined. When I started over, I followed instructions to make the file system readonly, turn off the tmpfs, turn off atime, etc. And never had another issue. Eventually I replaced the Pi with a newer one and haven't had any problems even though the file system is read/write. I think this issue may have affected the earlier models more, or maybe SD cards are better now.

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

#155

Post by thunfischbrot »

GordonS wrote: post #107
bityard wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single time the RPi comes up in an HN thread, someone mentions the reliability of SD cards. The truth is: 1) Regular SD cards were never designed to be OS volumes, of course they're going to fail when used for that. Buy better SD cards, like ones with high write endurance. 2) RPi 4 does not need to boot off SD card. It can boot from any USB drive of your choosing, or over Ethernet.

As this point, it's practically a meme. I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these dev…

While I am not one of those commenting on such issues except for your prompt–my experience with RPi 1 & 2 has been that they tended to eat sd cards for breakfast. Either needed reimaging or broke the sd cards for good. Had this at happen in at least eight instances. Especially, but not exclusively during unexpected power loss. Which tends to happen in both experimental and production environments, unless you take great care.

Younger generations have not had these issues for me. While I assigned that to my experience, usually reducing logging to sd card, booting off of USB and fewer unexpected power losses, it may simply not be an issue any more.

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

#156

Post by scbrg »

okprod wrote: post #121
CameronBanga wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Open Source Initiative recognizes AGPL as an open source license -> https://opensource.org/licenses/AGPL-3.0

The FSF recognizes AGPL as a free software license.

Where did you get the idea that open source and free software are mutually exclusive?

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

#157

Post by kubanczyk »

prionassembly wrote: post #131
thewakalix wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Altruism is simply a concern for others. In broad sense it can mean that you care whether others get more value (according to either receivers' opinion or your opinion about values).

"Effective" just means you don't want to waste money or time on values not important (according to either receivers' opinion or your opinion).

The fact that Givewell chooses certain values (the rational ones) and Christianity slightly different values is orthogonal to the concept of altruism.

Even if I believed in Flying Spaghetti Monster I could care whether others have a steady supply of macaroni. This makes me an altruist in my book. And I could act effectively about it. But I wouldn't complain about Givewell in that case.

And that's why I don't like conflating rationalism with effective altruism. It's just another case of emotional loading of a phrase.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

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

#158

Post by xnyan »

jjice wrote: post #82
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...

I was actually looking for something just like this since I won't have access to my Jellyfin server for a while. This looks perfect.

You should buy this guy’s application, but also keep in mind you can put Jellyfin on any Mac/Linux/Windows box and connect to it locally from your web browser. Obviously you’d also have to move any video you want to watch offline to your travel computer, but that’s true for any offline viewing.

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

#159

Post by bekindandopen »

GordonS wrote: post #107
bityard wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single time the RPi comes up in an HN thread, someone mentions the reliability of SD cards. The truth is: 1) Regular SD cards were never designed to be OS volumes, of course they're going to fail when used for that. Buy better SD cards, like ones with high write endurance. 2) RPi 4 does not need to boot off SD card. It can boot from any USB drive of your choosing, or over Ethernet.

As this point, it's practically a meme. I don't know if I've mentioned this on HN before, but my brother works for an oil services company, and they have deployed hundreds of RPis across sea and land rigs, mostly in the middle east. The land rigs are mobile, and as you can imagine, the middle of a desert in Oman is a pretty hostile environment. Despite this, they haven't had even a single failure across all these dev…

Could you expand more on the "mobile land rigs"?

I've always wondered if any organizations have tried to make something like a Sandcrawler.

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

#160

Post by gnramires »

ohazi wrote: post #124
bityard wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single time the RPi comes up in an HN thread, someone mentions the reliability of SD cards. The truth is: 1) Regular SD cards were never designed to be OS volumes, of course they're going to fail when used for that. Buy better SD cards, like ones with high write endurance. 2) RPi 4 does not need to boot off SD card. It can boot from any USB drive of your choosing, or over Ethernet.

It's much easier to buy industrial [1] and high endurance [2] microSD cards now. SanDisk/WD started selling them to the public due to the popularity of dashcams that record continuously. No more buying cards on digikey from a manufacturer you'd never heard of for 10x the price. I haven't seen reports of these particular cards being counterfeited yet, but still... you probably shouldn't buy them from Amazon... [1] htt…

WD Purple does seem to have proper wear-leveling as well[1], which are easy to find in retailers anywhere for a reasonable price.

I believe over-provisioning space to delay wear if you write much can also help (in conjunction with wear leveling).

[1] See this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/ex7dvo/quick_...

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