I took the leap and open-sourced my SaaS
My journey as a software developer started a long time ago. First, I only tinkered with small projects while I still was in school. Then I started a career as a professional software engineer and went from being employed to being self-employed as a freelancer. Since 2020, I'm also chasing my dream of making a living from my own products.
During this whole time, I always thought about getting active in open-source. As a software developer, I owe so much to open-source because everything you do is based on the work of others. I felt the urge to give something back, but I either had other priorities or had the fear that it would interfere with the goal of earning money with my products.
In the past years, there were more and more success stories of startups that open-sourced their codebase. Creating an "open source alternative" was the new trend. That made me think that open-source might not harm my product, but could even act as a catalyst for growth, if done right.
Today, I open-sourced the codebase of my new SaaS Vemetric, and I want to share with you my thoughts behind this decision.
What is Vemetric?
Vemetric is a simple, yet powerful analytics platform that helps you understand the behavior of your users. It comes with typical web analytics, but also provides you with product analytics features like User Journeys, Funnels, and more.
While working on my other product snappify, I tried different products in the market, but was never 100% satisfied. I always found something missing or thought the UX could be better. So after a lot of brainstorming, I decided to build my own product in that space.
I always shared many parts of my journey publicly
Since I've launched my first product, I learned that distribution is key to let people know about my products. I got into the build-in-public community on Twitter back in 2021, and I enjoyed sharing almost anything about my journey, from the latest achievements to how it's growing on the revenue ladder.
Many of these sharings led to opportunities I never thought of, and since then, I'm a huge fan of sharing stuff publicly. Open-sourcing takes this to the next level, and I spent a lot of time thinking if it would make sense for me and my products. With Vemetric, I entered a market with a lot of profitable open-source businesses - a good time to reevaluate my decision.
Getting into a market where open source is the norm
Looking at the analytics market, I saw that many open-source solutions popped up in the last years. Products like Plausible, Umami, and PostHog have shown that you can build a successful business while being open-source.
It also makes sense because there are also some bad players in the market where users aren't sure what happens with their data. Open-source gives that extra layer of transparency to see what's happening behind the scenes, and with self-hostable solutions, users even fully own their data.
Now that I've entered such a market, I thought: if I really want to give open-source a chance, then this is the right moment.
How to ensure a sustainable business model
My dream is to build a sustainable business with my products which I and my family can make a living from. My biggest fear with open-source was always that this interferes with that goal or could make it much harder.
But after a lot of researching, and discussions with other founders, I've come to the conclusion that this might not be the case if done right. That's why I'm also releasing the codebase of Vemetric under the AGPLv3 license, which allows commercial use of Vemetric's code for free, but requires others to open-source their code as well in case they use Vemetric's code.
The plan is that Vemetric should follow the typical open-core model that's also used by many of the other open-source startups. There will be a self-hostable Community Edition which will include the base features of Vemetric without limitations and will be free to use. Then there'll also be premium features that will only be available in the cloud offering, or via a specific license.
Open source as a growth catalyst
Since 2024, I'm a solopreneur, working on my products alone. That means that all of the different aspects of building a product are on me, and as a technical founder, marketing always was a weak point.
My hope is that open-source will also act as a growth catalyst, helping me to build a community around Vemetric. The idea is that it will be a huge help with spreading the word and getting more users.
Also, with the self-hostable Community Edition, I'm targeting users that don't want to use a SaaS, but rather host it on their own infrastructure. When those people are also happy with Vemetric, chances are that they'll share it with their peers, which will hopefully also result in more users for the hosted version.
Dealing with external contributions
One thing I'm really looking forward to is external feedback and contributions. But I'll also be careful in that regard. I have clear plans and visions for Vemetric, and that means that I sometimes need to say no to contributions that don't align with it.
I've set up some Contribution Guidelines to describe how and what to contribute to the project. If someone wants to contribute bigger changes, they should always open an issue first to discuss the desired changes, in order to avoid wasted effort.
Conclusion
Open-sourcing Vemetric is a really big step for me. I thought a lot about it, and I'm looking forward to how it will work out. I also feel like if I wouldn't do it now, I'd always regret not giving it a chance, and I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot on this journey.
It would be awesome if you could star the repository on GitHub, as it helps a lot with the visibility. 🙏
Are you also thinking about open-sourcing your SaaS? I'm happy to exchange, so feel free to reach out!
To finish it up, here are some blog posts I found super helpful around the topic of open-sourcing your SaaS: