Ask HN: Poetic.io, super easy file transfer – make it open source?
Few months ago I’ve deployed poetic.io (https://poetic.io), a super easy file transfer with a simple and nice UI.
Before trying to charge for a PRO version, I started thinking to make it open source and change completely the business model, making it much more like gitlab or wordpress. A free and community version (and later an enterprise version (paid) and paid support... let's see)
The main reason behind this is because I think there is a lot of good technology in poetic.io and I want to share it with the community. I think the community could also improve it and give to the project a boost and good ideas.
Main details: - It’s mainly built in ruby on rails, angular. - It uses s3 and direct upload for multipart resumable upload. With multipart upload the only limit is the s3 storage and the user bandwidth. - There is a built-in preview system which uses aws lambda to create previews. The previews can be viewed straightaway from the transfer page. - The user can download the single file or a zip of all the files of the transfer. - There is an admin panel where you can have the control of the transfers, customise the background, close the page with a password, set expiration time and many other things.
I would like at first to make it less dependent from aws (s3, lamda) giving the option to choose between a own server or s3/lambda.
Do you suggest to make it open straight away and only then start building a wizard setup, write documentation and polish the code, or the other way around?
Do you have any advise on this big pivot?
Thanks!
Alvise