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Comment by jimmy1 | Hacker News Reader

I will always cheer on someone building something cool, but here's the problem I have: Everyone wants to build an open source alternative, no one wants to make money. What is wrong with making money? Money is great -- it lets you buy clothes, food, shelter, water, and even a night out on the town or two. We need to be able to make money on software again, not just have user data be the product. This is partly to blame on the FOSS zealots. Sure they say it's "just fine" to make money on your software, but they never seemed to offer a method that is based in reality.

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Hi,

I 100% agree with you. I want this product to make money so that I can devote my full time to it.

The basic functionality will always be free without ads and tracking. But there will also be a very affordable ($1-2/mo) premium plan. I haven't yet decided what it's going to have. Most likely an ability to add more than 5 accounts or multiple accounts on the same platform (e.g. 3 Slack profiles).

It's perfectly fine to make money, nobody argues that. The point is that Open Source and making money don't contradict each other.

Examples:

- Conversations, the Android XMPP client, is GPL and sold on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conve... - There is also a paid hosted XMPP service on conversations.im.

- I have a paid+OSS app for amateur radio geolocation on Google Play myself. You can download the APK from the homepage or just directly buy it for some bucks.

- X-Chat, the OSS IRC client has a paid Windows version: http://xchat.org/windows/

You could OSS your app under whatever license you want, and still provide paid builds for any platform you want.

Don’t price your service so low! Anything below $5/mo gives the perception of having little value to offer. Plus you’re gonna lose a fat percentage to credit card processing.

To avoid credit card fees I was thinking about $12-24/year.

I don't want to charge a lot for a chat client, but these prices are not final. I know that charging too little is a mistake.

Open source and making money can be orthogonal

Well he didn't say he wasn't going to earn money from the project, just that the client is free. There are many ways to monetize something and the benefits of starting with free is that you get biggest growth and then you can find your "whales" and learn how to profit from them.

It doesn't seem like the parent wants to build an open source alternative. I remember reading about it over half a year ago (back then it was supposedly written in Go rather than C if I remember correctly) where there was also promise of open sourcing it.. His website also seems to indicate he now wants to go the route of SublimeText, so the open source promise should probably be interpreted as "I'll release the source code after I abandon the project, whether it takes one or ten years"..

FYI, I have nothing against closed source projects, but every discussion about eul.im seems to include the promise of open sourcing the project, which I'm sure is a great marketing ploy.

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