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Comment by ukutaht | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on an open-source web analytics tool over at https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible. It's currently bringing in $800/mo and growing pretty fast.

The code is all MIT license and we're working to make it easier to self-host. I make money through providing a hosted version of the product.

It's a similar model to Sentry or Gitlab. Open-source does not have to be libraries and frameworks, there are good opportunities to build more traditional SaaS products that can be self-hosted and you can make money by selling a hosted version.

I understand that not all open-source projects can be funded this way. Once I can pay my own salary, I'm planning to set aside a percentage of revenue to fund open-source projects that Plausible itself relies on.

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The solution looks great!

One advice: Make it easy to self host. I can see that this is not the case, perhaps not your focus currently. That will give you hundreds of free testers, that will provide QA to the solution you're making money creating. It's a beneficial cycle.

Absolutely! Sometimes it's hard to balance the open-source aspect with the business side. I'm burning through my savings right now so the focus has been to find paying customers.

At the moment I'm supporting some external contributors who are working on the self-hosted version. If things go well, we should have a first release next month or so.

Erm... not sure I follow.

While this is technically open source, it's not easily reusable as per your own FAQ and as such this is more of "open sourced for marketing reasons." You aren't really living off making an open source project, but rather you are open-sourcing a part of your service that pays the bills.

I'm pretty much sure that wasn't what the OP was asking about.

I like the look of this! I have a couple low-traffic sites I'd like to have analytics for, but I refuse to use cookies or otherwise do anything requiring a GDPR notice.

Features I'd like to see:

1. Search terms from referrers, or anything else that will help me focus for SEO type stuff.

2. Much more detail on the Device section. It's material to my design choices whether I have a lot of people on 4" smartphones or 13" tablets and so on. Right now I would have to capture that info separately.

3. More specific geolocation data: drill down at least to the state/major-metro level if possible. Or explain up-front why it's not possible.

I think the starting price is low enough, and gating it by page views is nice, so I'll probably give it a shot when I do my little redesign.

If I ever got to the point of needing the second-tier plan, though, I'd probably want more info than you're providing. Your prices are low enough I could imagine doing both (keeping Plausible and building my own) but it seems like a missed opportunity.

Best of luck with it!

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