Can Open Source Projects Make Money? Here's my formula, which might work
Second app launched!
Hi Friends,
I’m still alive and well, and I appreciate you opening this email after not hearing from me for over a month.
I’ll be brutally honest with you.
I could put aside everything and focus on one thing: https://kidcarecards.com.
No newsletters, a few tweets here and there, but I was heads down, working on my next thing.
Views tanked, my book sales dropped, and I have been writing for a month.
But was it worth it? Let’s find out.
Sorry for this scrappy mail, but this is all I have that I think is worth sharing.
Kid Care Cards was my wife’s idea shortly after we became parents a year ago. She thought it’d be cool to have an app where you record every sickness that has ever happened to your kid and what the solutions were that helped.
And because parents usually have their hands full, it’d be cool to have a dictation feature so you can use this hands-free.
So I thought, "How hard could this be?" I add a few tables on the backend, and then OpenAI Whisper for transcription, and there you go.
Well, not so fast.
Privacy
When I created my first AI wrapper that turned your long-form posts into short tweets or LinkedIn posts, I only saved the short-form versions in the DB. Marketing this mostly to developers who write technical blog posts, you can imagine what kind of data I had in my DB after some time.
Things are different when it comes to health-related data, especially if it’s about your child.
I was thinking, both as a parent and as a developer.
How would the app look like where I would put some data about my kid into without having doubts how it’s stored?
This is how I arrived at the first roadblock, where I’ve spent considerable time.
The web app does client-side encryption using the users’ UUID and a user-specific salt created during sign-up.
Open Source
But then my next thought came: let’s say I write on my website that I encrypted your stuff, how do I know that?
This is where I knew this whole thing had to be open source, so you can see how encryption is done for yourself.
So, for example, SECURITY.md outlines all security features and explains why I’m using them.
But now the interesting question came: how do I make money with this if it’s open source?
Business Model
I think every SaaS can be open-sourced until this formula is true:
So, in my simple mind, I just made the following calculations:
A VPC is around $5/mo, and to use the dictation, you must buy at least $5 worth of credits with OpenAI. Your cost after a year would be:
For $65 on Kid Care Cards, you can buy 1750 dictation credits, and you can dictate for about 5 minutes for each credit.
That’s 145 hours worth of dictation.
I truly hope your kid won’t even be that sick and that often that you’d need 145 hours to dictate all the problems they had.
So, how did this all work out, and what have I learned?
This is pretty much all the time I had for this post. I really appreciate your patience for still hanging around.
See you in the next one.
- Akos
I’d share here my usual recommendations, but I haven’t read anything, just coded the whole time. 😄
Check out kidcarecards.com!
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Very interesting one. Self-hosting being possible, but harder in terms of effort, and more pricey in terms of money, makes it easier to just pay you for the SaaS version.