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Show HN: DrawDB – open-source online database diagram editor (a retro)

(www.drawdb.app)
263 points 1ilit | 1 comments | 09 Apr 25 00:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source

One year ago I open-sourced my very first 'real' project and shared it here. I was a college student in my senior year and desperately looking for a job. At the time of sharing it i couldn't even afford a domain and naively let someone buy the one i had my eyes on lol. It's been a hell of a year with this blowing up, me moving to another country, and switching 2 jobs.

In a year we somehow managed to hit 26k stars, grow a 1000+ person discord community, and support 37 languages. I couldn't be more grateful for the community that helped this grow, but now i don't know what direction to take this project in.

All of this was an accident. But now I feel like I'm missing out on not using this success. I have been thinking of monetization options, but not sure if I wanna go down that route. I like the idea of it being free and available for everyone but also can't help but think of everything that could be done if committed full-time or even had a small team. I keep telling myself(and others) i'll do something if i meet a co-founder, but doubt and fear of blowing this up keeps back.

How would you proceed?

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metadata ◴[09 Apr 25 14:11 UTC] No.43632366[source]▶
Just for the context, I've been making (and selling) database (migration/translation) tools for 20-ish years.

What you have built can definitely become a product supporting you with a very nice income. Free version can stay free but you can sell solo licenses and team licenses as subscriptions. Paid license users will also have your support - and that matters to companies.

As others have said, commercial features can be built on top of the OSS product, like Electron desktop client, support for more databases, for views/procedures etc.

There is no downside to trying to commercialize this. Whoever wants to use what you have built so far can continue and I guarantee that many companies would be happy to give you $50/month for a more advanced version with support.

(edit for typo)

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ranger_danger ◴[09 Apr 25 18:23 UTC] No.43635530[source]▶
> There is no downside to trying to commercialize this

I know lots of people in the FOSS community who would stop using it as soon as you "sold out"... but those people probably don't represent the majority of potential users.

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evanelias ◴[09 Apr 25 18:59 UTC] No.43636160[source]▶
Legally, any enhanced version would need to remain FOSS anyway. It appears to be an AGPL-licensed project with 60+ contributors and no CLA, so the codebase has 60+ different copyright holders.

Monetization of a GPL or AGPL project generally involves a CLA so that the creator can offer closed-source and/or SaaS enhancements while still accepting third-party contributions. Without a CLA, the project creator would be violating the copyright license that was granted by the third-party code contributors. He/she doesn't own their code and cannot relicense it in a way that violates the AGPL.

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jurgenaut23 ◴[10 Apr 25 09:17 UTC] No.43642185[source]▶
Out of curiosity, is that also true if you merely want to sell services such as support on top of it? How about customization?
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1. evanelias ◴[10 Apr 25 15:03 UTC] No.43644550[source]▶
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

Selling services like support or consulting is fine, since that's generally independent from FOSS licensing/copyright concerns. Anyone can do that though, not just the creator or contributors. For example, there are lots of third party database consultancies that offer support for major databases, both FOSS and commercial.

Customization is also fine, but the purchaser of the customization must still abide by the AGPL: the end-users of the customized software need access to the customized codebase. If the customized product is only being used internally (e.g. for employees of the company that purchased the customization) then there's no problem. But if they're offering it in an externally-facing SaaS, or embedding it in externally-distributed software, the customized code must be made available to the end-users of the software.

With FOSS often it's simpler to do this as "sponsored development" where someone pays for a new feature to be made directly upstream, rather than having a customized fork.

That all said, services and customization are generally difficult to scale as a business. Even with a fairly large userbase, the percentage of companies who are willing to pay for support or customization tends to be disappointingly low.