Sharing something awesome that you have built and show it to the world is easy. Making it easy for others get started using it and earn money from it is extremely hard. Does it have to be that way?
Sharing what you have built and making it available for the public as open source is possible today by publishing it on one of the major code repositories such as GitHub or GitLab. It is not difficult and does not cost you anything either. You add a readme and instructions on how to get started and then you move on to your next project. That is perfectly fine and there are tons of these type of projects in these repositories.
As you may not have a clear intention on how to earn any money you are happy just showing your awesome work to the world. And you know it takes a big investment in time and money to offer your software as a service. By enabling it as a service you reduce the barrier for a user to get started with it.
Not all software is relevant to make available as a service. A library or framework does not even fit that purpose. But let say you have developed something that could work out well as a service there are several things you need to do to make it available as a service.
Hosting the Software
You need to find a place to host the software and with the cloud providers available out there you thankfully don’t need your own datacenter today for it. Spinning up a virtual machine on any of the large cloud provider or using services like Heroku is not difficult by itself, it is associated with a cost that you would have to bear. Buying a domain name and handling SSL certificates also add some costs. Cost that you would have to take before you even know how popular your software is (yes of course we all know it is awesome). And when the popularity grows traffic and CPU costs increases.
Covering Usage Costs and Handle Payments
So now you need to think of how you will cover the costs. You need to come up with a business model that scales with the increased costs. Depending on your service this might not be that complex but if you did not have this in mind when developing the software (you just wanted to be awesome, right?) this could be quite a task to change the software to fit this model.
Now if you have a way in your software to handle users and your software can scale with the usage base you need a way for the user to pay for their use. Handling payments mean that you also need to have a secure way of handling user and payment details. You need to develop a web site for a user to sign up, login and handle credit card payments. While the latter is achieved with third-party systems you still need to build an integration with it.
I think that at this point you are not feeling as awesome as before you started this endeavor.
Support
Some level of support and service availability is expected by the paying users. Even though you feel that it is just to cover your hosting costs not everyone using your service may understand this.
All these things added together is just too much and starting to become a financial risk. So, you give up and your awesome code is just lying there, and you leave it as it is. Which is of course perfectly fine, and you move on to the next thing.
The Solution
As you probably have anticipated if you have read this far, I will present a solution to this problem. And that is exactly what I am about to do.
We developed Open Source Cloud to reduce the barrier for users to getting started with open source and at the same time reduce the barrier for an open source creator to offer their software as a service. Being awesome should be easy.
The Open Source Cloud supply chain takes a GitHub repository URL and if it is a software that is not a framework or library the supply chain converts this into a software as a service. You sign up and login to the platform and connect your GitHub account and organization and all your repositories that are already available as a service are automatically connected to your account. You have now claimed ownership of these services and a share of the revenue these services brings is shared with you.
You can also submit your own repository or another repository that you would like to see available in the platform. Once reviewed and approved it will be added to the supply chain.
Cost for hosting, infrastructure and operations is handled by us and charged to the users of the services. User management and payments are handled by our platform, and you can focus on building new and awesome code that you make available as open source.
We reduce the barrier to get started using open source and reduce the barrier for creators to make their software available as a service.
A win-win!
To discover what is already available today and try it out you can sign-up for free and run a free plan for as long as you like.
Visit https://www.osaas.io to get started!
Top comments (0)