Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

indiehackers.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 214 posts

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

#91

Post by yboris »

mraza007 wrote: post #90
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...

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.

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

#92

Post by GoblinSlayer »

NoThisIsMe wrote: post #73
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.

Yes. It's right there in bold: the customer is provided with the source code of the extension when they purchase it. So long as the user is free to study, modify, and distribute this source code, then it's FOSS.

Maybe it's just because the interface is a shop? Or because the extensions are automatically packaged.

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

#93

Post by scottlamb »

bityard wrote: post #80
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…

There are plenty of cases where I want to own a thing, but make someone else responsible for managing it. And if they fail or go away, I want to know that I can hire someone else to manage it instead. If the app is hosted entirely in the cloud, _everything_ is gone if the provider pulls the plug suddenly. If the app is hosted on a device that I own and the provider goes away, it will probably still keep working for a…

It's a given that you should have backups of your business data, no matter if you're using a hosted installation or a local one. With backups, if the hosted provider pulls the plug, you don't lose _everything_. You may be scrambling to set up the replacement but you have your data, and in this case you'd also have the source code, so you'll survive.

And keep in mind that "Raspberry Pi fails" is a more common scenario than "provider goes out of business", so from the perspective of minimizing the scramble, that's the one I'd be more concerned about.

A bit more about backups: for something truly important, you should have an offline copy, in case a malicious party compromises credentials that can be used to overwrite both the primary and the backup. I don't think you should depend on the vendor backing up your data. Some things you just have to do yourself, unfortunately.

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

#94

Post by la_fayette »

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.

Haha so cool!

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

#95

Post by la_fayette »

leovailati wrote: post #63
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.

Just wondering here, is there any way to protect oneself from that type of situation while at the same time keeping the source code open? Obviously, the name and logo are trademarked, but a third party could rebrand the program while using the same underlying source code.

The advanced features seem to be a good protection. Also the cost ist quite low, if you competing in the same market could you offer the service cheaper? I guess not. Moreover it is critical software for small businesses, I think many would pay for long term support on the original software...

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

#96

Post by orangeshark »

amenod wrote: post #13
mosaic_school wrote: post #7

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.

Even though OSI clearly defines what "open source" means, it is sometimes (often even?) used as a synonym for "source available", as opposed to "free software" (which is the term that FSF promotes). I'm not saying which term is better, just explaining why "open source" might not be objectively wrong in this case.

> Even though OSI clearly defines what "open source" means, it is sometimes (often even?) used as a synonym for "source available"

Where do they define this? In the OSI definition it doesn't mention having the source available for everyone, only that whoever has the program should be able to get the source[0]. I do believe it doesn't follow "open source" the development model where development is in the open and anyone can contribute.

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

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

#97

Post by neophiite »

npsimons wrote: post #68
mosaic_school wrote: post #7

Please correct me if I'm wrong but this is not how I understand the meaning of "open source software". It sounds rather like customers get source access. Do they have the right to sell the source code or re-release it in any way by following an open source license? ( https://opensource.org/licenses ) P.S. I'm not criticizing your business model or anyone elses.

> It sounds rather like customers get source access. Technically, you could provide binaries and a GPL license, then provide source code when verified customers (eg they send their receipt/license number with their request) ask for it. IANAL, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing in GPL that says you can't sell the software and operate this way. If your customers hand out the binaries to third parties, that's on…

That's the business model of grsecurity (selling security patches for the linux kernel). They have an additional clause that if you re-sell/re-release the patches, you lose access to future patches. It's controversial.

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

#98

Post by skrtskrt »

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.

Can a RPi4 bought before the USB boot was added have it enabled?

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

#99

Post by dwohnitmok »

neophiite wrote: post #97
npsimons wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It sounds rather like customers get source access. Technically, you could provide binaries and a GPL license, then provide source code when verified customers (eg they send their receipt/license number with their request) ask for it. IANAL, but as far as I can tell, there's nothing in GPL that says you can't sell the software and operate this way. If your customers hand out the binaries to third parties, that's on…

That's the business model of grsecurity (selling security patches for the linux kernel). They have an additional clause that if you re-sell/re-release the patches, you lose access to future patches. It's controversial.

grsecurity's policy is such a fascinating end-run against the usual redistribution freedom associated with open source.

"Sure you can redistribute the software. We'll just cut you off if you do."

But suing Bruce Perens for saying that this is a legal risk is a pretty bad look for grsecurity...

https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/27/grsecurity_bruce_pere...

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

#100

Post by prepend »

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…

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 make easily verifiable claims without trying.

I’ve dealt with lots of projects that are crappy about licenses and frequently have to download the tarball to look for licenses, just to check if I can actually use.

The author could make this easier, but she didn’t. That doesn’t mean I should go into attack mode because other people make bad claims. (And I suppose I give up after 10 seconds and don’t want to stick around for 20 seconds)

I also noticed that author doesn’t even link to her project. Maybe it’s because her project is in German and the blog is English. But I’d rather have more posts like this with whatever time the author can spend, than wait for it to sit in draft while unimportant details are finally added.

[0] https://www.open3a.de/page-Download

Post reply on HN