Ask HN: Does a framework exist for “open-source SaaS”?

32 points by reisr3 2 years ago | 18 comments

The OSS model for collaborating on code is broadly understood. I'm curious if anyone has been successful in deploying and hosting a SaaS app in an open-source way, using community or public user funding.

For example, many of us use Calendly. There are many for-profit Calendly alternatives. Could we band together and create an open-source, truly free Calendly alternative where users split hosting costs in a fair way? The cost for functionality would go down to pennies per user, since no one expects to make a profit. I don't necessarily want to take on the whole burden of self-hosting an open-source platform, but would be happy to pay for usage if those funds only go towards keeping the platform online.

Just curious if some such experiment has been successful, or perhaps why they fail.

zokier 2 years ago |

To me this sounds a bit like what Sandcats/Sandstorm wanted to be; open-source paas that allowed basically one-click deployment of applications from open-source repository of packages.

Problem is that all parts of this process needs funding, which makes it difficult to make work. Someone needs to run the physical infrastructure, someone needs to operate the paas platfrom, someone needs to develop/maintain the paas platform codebase, someone needs to develop the actual applications, and someone needs to maintain the application packaging/deployment stuff. And all those someones should somehow get fair market-rate compensation for the work they do.

One way of providing compensation is to hand out credits for the service, but in practice it is probably infeasible to make the numbers really work out. And even if all the labor is compensated through service credits, you still need actual real money flowing in to pay for colo and hardware etc, which probably needs to come from the otherwise non-contributing userbase.

Not saying it is completely impossible thing to accomplish, but it is really difficult to bootstrap, and almost as difficult to keep running sustainability, especially when individual people inevitably come and go.

penaazv 2 years ago |

Have you heard of Commercial open source (COSS)? It's a growing industry of promising OSS tools combining the benefits of proprietary SaaS with open source software.

As for the Calendly alternative instance - have you heard of cal.com? It's free for individuals.

I recently wrote this article featuring their origin story: <https://blog.scoutflo.com/cal-com-the-coolest-open-source-al...>

reisr3 2 years ago | |

No, I hadn't heard of COSS! Thanks for that - reading up on it now. Seems like exactly the framework I'm thinking about.

I love the Cal.com story. What gives me some pause is that they're VC-backed. $25M Series A. The free tier might be great, and I might come to rely upon it. But they're expected to produce an outsized ROI, and the traditional SaaS play is to give it away for free to capture the market and then raise prices. I'd much prefer a community-driven effort where we have no ROI expectations, so it can remain low-cost forever as we're just splitting overhead.

Peer_Rich 2 years ago | | |

hey, peer here, cofounder of cal.com. We are quite fortunate to have a growing enterprise business that is subsidising the free plan.

we will never raise prices for the free plan, free stays free, especially since it's open source which means if we were to raise, it would compete with the self-hosted product and we really dont want that

rest assured, we are comfortable providing a free product with enterprise customers

penaazv 2 years ago | | |

You're welcome! You can check this <https://cal.com/open> out to know more about the philosophy behind it.

You'll also find something called OSS Friends on this page - featuring more COSS startups in the ecosystem.

kornhole 2 years ago |

A good example of this is Nextcloud. The SW is FOSS. Over 400K installations are hosted in many ways including on home single board computer servers, Synology NAS, on a VPS, or as a service from providers such as https://ppp.woelkli.com/ or Hetzner.com. The calendar app is very functional and allows booking of appointments based on availability similar to Calendly. This is one of many apps within its large and expanding suite.

KronisLV 2 years ago | |

> The calendar app is very functional and allows booking of appointments based on availability similar to Calendly. This is one of many apps within its large and expanding suite.

Another noteworthy one is Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

It's not quite as good as something like a self-hosted instance of Mattermost or even Rocket.Chat, but honestly if you already have Nextcloud, then it's pretty cool to be able to get something decent like that up and running quickly.

Ofc that's making Nextcloud a single point of failure in some ways and occasionally things can go sideways with these plugin based platforms (historically applies more to installs of Jenkins, but also have had some performance issues with Nextcloud that had lots of apps, too).

I still rather like Nextcloud because of being able to just run it on my servers and replace a bunch of other third party cloud platforms and still somehow manage to have good enough uptime and security.

I wonder what other cool self-hosted platforms are out there, maybe some of what Odoo has (cool idea but a bit underwhelming last I checked): https://github.com/odoo/odoo and https://www.odoo.com/

Or something in: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

kornhole 2 years ago | | |

Yes Talk is awesome. I have a link on my personal web page to book a meeting with me based on availability on my multiple calendars. The person booking the meeting automatically gets a calendar invite by email with a Nextcloud Talk conference link.

I do have a lot of eggs in one basket with NC, but I have never had any issues. After running it for years, I am impressed with the rate of development of new features and apps. Whatever someone's experience was with it a year ago or so should be revisited with the latest version.

reedciccio 2 years ago |

WordPress! Why is it so often forgotten? Automattic created an impressive ecosystem based on GPL code, and SaaS.

tweetle_beetle 2 years ago |

That does already exist to some extent. It's relatively niche for now and unlikely to ever get significant market share, but it warms my heart to know that people are doing just that through CHATONS[1]. I can't speak for them, but as a user it a provides a framework for this type of service to be commoditised, but also independent. Not all the providers offer the same services, but I can fairly easily swap provider knowing that the core philosophy is consistent.

It's a natural extension of Framasoft, where they opened up their concept so that they were not a single point of failure.

The providers are almost exclusivey based in Europe currently[2], likely due to the French origins of Framasoft. But there's no reason it has to stay thay way.

[1] https://www.chatons.org/ [2] https://www.chatons.org/search/near-me

saluki 2 years ago |

No, we don't have the technology.

Running a SaaS reliably involves a lot more than just the open source app.

Who's going to handle DevOps and Security, product road map, paying for hosting, transactional emails, etc.

A SaaS is a business, has expenses, needs revenue.

bluecabbage 2 years ago |

Seems like it's already mentioned, but I've also had a great experience with https://cal.com/ :)

jeena 2 years ago |

We have this working quite well with the Fediverse where we have thousands of instances of Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Pleroma and so on running of donations of the users of those instances.

ano88888 2 years ago |

The alternative is non-profit SAAS. It will operate like a company and continously improving based on user feedback. But the goal of the company is not to maximize sharehoder profit but to bring delights to both users and employees with minimal cost to users while taking care of the employees.

no_wizard 2 years ago |

Does cal.com not fit for purpose?

ipaddr 2 years ago |

Check github, I've open sourced my sass as have thousands of others. Look for a project related your niche. Saw a php gym manager sass the other day. So many unique projects are out there