I’ve grown my open-source PDF editor to $20,000/mo AMA.
I started PDFsam 17 years ago as an OSS project because I couldn't find something similar and I was a fan of OSS. It got success and grew to a big user base.
I tried monetizing with donations, paid installers, website ads, horrible ads bundled within the installer and I was very frustrated because the user base was huge and I couldn't make out a decent revenue.
I finally found my balance with 2 premium versions sitting next to the free and open source version.
I'm now at around $20k monthly revenue (recurring and not).
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How long did it take to actually bring in a revenue? 17 years is a long time, so what kept you working on this?
It took me around 10 years to get a decent income, before that it was some donation and some ads income. In those years it was mostly passion, I liked to have a place where I could experiment or apply things I learned, where I could decide what library or pattern to use, all things that I couldn't do in my day job, or at least not as freely as I could in my own project.
Thanks for the response. That's really cool that it started as side project where you could apply new things you learned that you couldn't apply to your day job. That's something I've done as well and I've found it helps with my creative sanity.
Very cool you've ended up making it quite profitable after all the years.
How have you gone about building your project? What has been the tech stack you've utilized over the last 17 years. I'm sure the tech has changed dramatically, but perhaps it hasn't. If it aint broke don't fix it.
I started with Java 1.4.2 because Java was my language and the only decent PDF engine available at the time for Java was iText. The desktop application was Java Swing. Now it's JavaFX, we have a PDF engine we maintain that is a fork of PDFBox and we created a set of high level API on top of it called Sejda SDK. The website was WordPress (the blog still is), now is a static website with a CI pipeline that creates a Docker image and deploys it in a Kubernetes cluster (where other stuff like the license server for the premium version is).
Wild. Glad to see your post here.
You mention above it's difficult to monetize OSS and you're making $20K between MRR and standalone revenue. How is that 20K monthly being broken down?
Do you have a substantial costs as well? How does one monetize an OSS project?
The OSS application is monetized through ads on the website and it makes something around 1/5 of the monthly revenue. Being widely used it's also an established brand and it supports our premium applications sales (we have 2 of them, one I develop and one provided by a partner).
Costs are neglectable and they are shared among the applications (hosting, db, etc)
Hey, that's really cool! I'm glad you were able to turn your project into a full-time job. Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about starting an OSS project?
My advice would probably be to really think about the "why". Why OSS? If it's because you believe in OSS and its philosophy then go for it, it's very fulfilling, you feel like one of the good guys, sharing knowledge and enabling others to do things with your project/library/software, you can also be part of a community with similar views etc. If you are not 100% convinced then It may become a source of frustration, it's very hard to find a way to squeeze money out of it, many users don't even know what OSS is, they just see free stuff and that's a bit depressing... moreover many users feel like they are customers so you get comments or support requests that leave you with a WTF? feeling. Anyway, just know what you are getting into.
This is excellent advice! I'm often tempted by OSS because of the philosophy and building trust with end-users. However, I also often see those WTF comments/requests in general and on OSS projects and wonder if all I'll be doing is support to non-paying end-users.
On the other side, you also get comments and feedback like "you saved my life! thank you!" which are very nice and welcome, when you work on something mostly out of passion. You also mentioned trust with end-users and you are probably right, I think my OSS version helps sales of the premium ones because users trust it and trust the brand.
That's great advice! I think it's important to really think about the "why" before starting an OSS project. Otherwise it can become a source of frustration.
Congrats on your journey with 17 years on OSS project.
Yes, there are good number of open source projects making decent revenue with free product and a commercial version. Great to see this.
On top of this, there are other companies like Friendly.is that use existing Open source projects to make revenue. Friendly.is: Friendly is making close to $100K ARR without writing any code but just by using existing open-source projects. Friendly used two open-source projects related to analytics and automation to build this revenue.
Great work again!!
That's very nice, congrats!
This is a nice example of how OSS software enables others to bring their ideas to life. It also clearly shows how important it is to economically support the OSS libs/software you use.
Build stuff, share some $ with the OSS you use, be happy!
Congrats on this successful journey!
PDFsam is a great product I used during my years of studying. I enjoyed how easy it was to extract and merge pdf slides to rationalize the huge slide decks our professors gave us.
After all these years of maintaining a desktop application, what are the major challenges? I belive that every platform is linked to its own problems and as I'm more on the web and mobile side, I'm curious how it its for desktop applications.
Congrats for your tool! I am one of the users.
Did you work directly on the technical portion and business model afterwards?
I developed it for some year having a lot of fun just doing that, implementing users feedback, getting ideas from users use case.. an then at some point I told myself "Wouldn't it be great if this was my actual job?" and next the most favored question for every developer of a decently popular OSS project "if I only could get 1$ from each user, how do I do that?". Speaking of business model, I learned there's a great difference between 0 and 1$...
Great recap: Speaking of business model, I learned there's a great difference between 0 and 1$...
Keep on your great work!
OSS isn't really a marketing feature unless the clients know what it is. Unless they need customization or needs to extend the features, they don't need to deal with source code, which is most of the application users.
This comment was deleted 10 months ago.
The game changer has been to provide a premium version side by side the OSS, it really boosted profit to a level where I could leave my daily job to do this full time. Before that I tried donations (I still get them) and it's a nice form of support but it's almost irrelevant. Ads bring quite some money but they have drawbacks , they are not very nice and look unprofessional, plus you may end up pushing your competitors, not to mention the growing ads blocker. I had advertisements bundled into the installer and they were very bad, users didn't want them and with good reasons. I now offer the premium version through the installer of the OSS version in a very transparent and clear way and I think that's acceptable, a "hey, BTW we have this premium version , do you want to try it?" checkbox. So if I have to summarize:
1 - Donations are good but not enough, by far, don't count on them.
2 - A premium companion version is the way (although a bit sad because it means the OSS version will always be the little ugly brother)
3 - Don't bundle third party stuff with your installer
4 - Use Ads if it's really worth and keep an eye on the advertisers, don't promote competitors.
This comment was deleted 10 months ago.