Show HN: New Version of MyOwnDB
myowndb.com
The app was initially published in 2006 using the then-recent Ruby on Rails, and incorporating fresh Ajax (YUI) and cloud (S3) technologies. Although the app stayed available all these years, it stagnated feature-wise because making changes appeared to become harder and harder due to some technology choices. Learning lessons from that [2], I decided to rewrite it, and chose F#[3] and WebSharper[4].
Those proved to be good choices, but now comes the harder part for me: promoting it and commercialising it.
I think the app proposes some interesting features like:
- multi-lingual UI
- lots of help throughout the app
- intuitive data types like file attachments, email address, URL, choice in a list, ...
- a form embeddable in a website for data collection
These are some points I'm currently working on regarding the commercialisation of the app (suggestions welcome!):
- I'm working on proposing paid plans for the hosted app [5] (currently putting everybody on a free plan).
- the code is published on Gitlab[6] under the AGPL license. Maybe proposing an additional commercial license would help, but in that case I'll need to use a Contributor License Agreement, which is an additional hurdle for outside contributors. Anyone having experience with that?
- I might need to identify and focus on a niche for the app. Any suggestion?
- I'm looking at easy migration from the hosted app to a self-hosted instance as I would like to build a business on trust.