How to monetize your open-source project (and not get your code jacked) — Marko Saric of Plausible ($97,000 MRR)

Open-source projects are a beautiful thing, but to many (myself included), they might seem a little starry-eyed. After all, how do you monetize? How do you not get your code jacked by competitors?

I spoke with @markosaric, whose open-source product Plausible is making well over $1MM per year. Turns out, it's very possible to make money in open source. In fact, in some ways, it's easier.

But I'll let the expert speak for himself:

Why make Plausible open-source

Marko: We open-sourced Plausible to be as transparent as possible and to give people more control over their data. We're in the privacy-first market so working on an open-source product is a way for us to build trust with our audience.

When you're open-source, all of your code is available to the public. People can inspect it, analyze it and even download it to run it on their own machines — this is a whole different level to what proprietary software can offer. With open-source software, our audience can check whether our actions match with our words.

I would recommend it to others especially those that are in the privacy- first market, or those that are having a more technical audience as their market.

This trust and transparency aspect of open-source also means that building a passionate audience may be a bit easier than in the case of closed-source software. There are a lot of people that are really into open-source software and they're really passionate about it. These people wouldn't even consider something like Plausible if it were not open-source.

Where he finds his customers

Marko: GitHub is still one of our top sources of traffic and trial signups. All of our development is done in public on GitHub so we're very active there. And GitHub is a large community so the network effect is there. We currently have more than 11,000 stars on GitHub.

All of our website stats are open to the public too. Looking at the last 12 months, GitHub sent more than 18,000 visitors to our site which makes it our fourth best traffic source behind Google, Hacker News and Twitter. In terms of sources of trial signups, it is the third best.

Monetizing: What worked, and what didn’t (hint: donations royally flopped)

Marko: We've tried to do monetization with donations, which seems like one of the more common ways people in the open-source world fund their projects. This turned out to be a big failure for us. We’re grateful to the 42 people who choose to donate approximately $400 per month in total between them.

At the same time, our cloud has grown to more than $1MM ARR, so it is crystal clear that without us having people who are happy to pay for Plausible managed service in the cloud, Plausible itself and our self-hosted release wouldn’t exist. Or at least we wouldn't be able to work on it much because we would need to have other jobs to pay our rent. We also wouldn't be able to have a team of seven people like we have now.

So at least for our situation, having a managed solution in the cloud was the best way to go.

The serious threats Plausible faced as an open-source product

Marko: On the negative side, going open-source opens you up to some potential issues that proprietary software projects don't need to worry about. For instance, we launched with what's called a permissive open-source license. When we started getting some buzz in different niche communities, we realized that there were some negative aspects of having a permissive open-source license (i.e. corporations were happy to take advantage of us).

There were cases of larger teams that took our code and used it to create and sell proprietary tools that directly competed with us. There were cases of corporations that wanted to resell our software without wanting to contribute anything back to the project. These were serious threats to the sustainability and longevity of our (at that stage) very young project.

Plausible is our first open-source venture that got any traction, so we were surprised by some of these issues and had to spend time researching and picking a license that better fit our needs.

I’m pretty new to the world of open source licensing, so I ended up learning about AGPL only a few days before we officially switched. We haven’t had any other issues with this since we made that switch.

The challenges of managing a growing open-source community

Marko: Managing a growing open-source community is another challenging aspect. We have many self-hosting users, and self-hosting software is challenging. As we grew, we started getting many questions from people asking for our help installing Plausible on their servers or to help them maintain their self-hosted instances.

We tried to help initially but because people can self-host in so many different ways, it's impossible to deal with if you have limited resources like us. Providing great support for people using our managed hosting is so much easier, as we do the hosting and maintenance for them, so the questions are more about stats and actual product itself.

We could easily spend all of our time troubleshooting self-hosted installations, but it is not sustainable. So we decided to make our self-hosted a long-term release (i.e. it is released twice a year or so rather than changed daily like our managed hosting is) and we decided to make the support for self-hosted community only. This has helped a lot so we can focus more of our time on building a sustainable project.

We still get way too many people asking for help with self-hosting but at least now the expectations have been set and communicated clearly. We don't feel the pressure to help everyone and can direct them to our community support forum instead.

Why, despite the challenges he’d go the open-source route again

Marko: I would do it again and I would recommend it to others especially those that are in the privacy-first market, or those that are having a more technical audience as their market.

So many people are passionate about open-source and there's a lot of goodwill with people sharing and recommending Plausible to the world. We even had some people contribute code and improve Plausible for everyone. All of these would be more difficult, or even impossible to achieve with a proprietary product.

A huge thank you to Marko for sharing his experience. Hope it's helpful to anyone thinking about going open-source! 🚀