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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

#41

Post by jensus »

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.

found the site and app to be very snappy with a connection from England. Might give more understanding to your experience if you added some context, location, internet speed ect.

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

#42

Post by 4ggr0 »

tasogare wrote: post #4
clcaev wrote: post #2

[revision] In the comments section, following the article, she notes the extensions are open source, distributed when purchased. The license used for these extensions is not specified. Thank you for pronoun correction.

*she as someone who read the full article would notice.

You actually read the articles on HN, and don't just form an opinion and write a comment after reading the headline alone? Pha, blasphemy.

EDIT: I forgot that I'm not on Reddit, sorry. I will stop making jokes.

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

#43

Post by II2II »

yakubin wrote: post #32
prepend wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I’m contradicting the author without validating my claim. And it’s super easy to validate my claim, but I just didn’t. When confronted, I complain that it takes greater than 10 seconds to verify my claim.” This is curious behavior. There’s lots of incorrect and misleading articles. But I try to bring up questions only when exhausting reasonable investigations.

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…

There is a trail of links from the article that will bring you to the download. Click on the author's name to see their profile, click on the project to see the project's profile, click on the link to the project website, then click on the link to the downloads page. While the trail is a bit much, it is important to keep in mind the article was an account of the author's experiences and it published on a portal for indie developers. A direct link may not have been seen as appropriate given the context.

While I agree with companies misrepresenting their products as open source as being a problem and believe the AGPL should have been mentioned, I do not see how the point about open source being hard to sell as being relevant. Not only are there are success stories in the world of open source, but the author made their success sound modest.

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

#45

Post by fsflover »

pietrovismara wrote: post #40

Following the recent events, wait until multinational corporation x comes, repackages your software as a managed solution, hosted on their infrastructure and resells it through their channels.

Multinational corporations typically are very afraid of AGPLv3.

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

#46

Post by javajosh »

tyingq wrote: post #36
protomyth wrote: post #6

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 This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It reminds me of Ubiquity's cloud key. I wish some government grant…

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

Or buy two or more put them on the same subnet and let them replicate. More money!

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

#47

Post by II2II »

Things that I like about her account: it is sounds like a modest success story with an end that is within reach of more people and places more emphasis on the value of work instead of getting rich quick. The part about her product being open source will also appeal to a certain audience.

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

#48

Post by gen220 »

tyingq wrote: post #36
protomyth wrote: post #6

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 This would be an interesting model for quite a few services. It reminds me of Ubiquity's cloud key. I wish some government grant…

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

You can boot the RPI off of an SSD nowadays, or boot off an SD card with the root file system on an SSD.

I also used to be concerned about persisting data on a RPIs because of the SD card problem.

But this setup is quite comparable to a standard Linux box with no replication. From there you can setup ZFS if you care to, or be satisfied with daily backups to the cloud.

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

#49

Post by yboris »

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...

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

#50

Post by pietrovismara »

fsflover wrote: post #45
pietrovismara wrote: post #40

Following the recent events, wait until multinational corporation x comes, repackages your software as a managed solution, hosted on their infrastructure and resells it through their channels.

Multinational corporations typically are very afraid of AGPLv3.

See my comment as a snarky reply to the recent HN threads about the aws/elastic debate, not as a serious contribution.

Although on a more serious note, I can clearly remember self appointed knights of FOSS claiming on those threads that AGPL is bad because it harms adoption.

I see it more as a form of protection against corporate exploitation, apparently OP does too.

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