Since major of startups fail, isn't it a good idea for a startup to commit to this at the beginning? Even privately to not disalign the success goal. If they don't commit to this it is zillion times worst than technical debt.
Since major of startups fail, isn't it a good idea for a startup to commit to this at the beginning? Even privately to not disalign the success goal. If they don't commit to this it is zillion times worst than technical debt.
Colin Percival's Tarsnap famously has such mechanic (though not a startup). It ensures you wouldn't fall into some kind of bus problem. However, it creates an incentive where the general public has an incentive to see the product fail. I word it like that because from my PoV the general public has a net benefit from F(L)OSS. I suppose that is why people prefer to keep such secret.
But hopefully not before it is too late. We should all think about situations where we are no longer around. Like having your keys/passwords at a notary.
I word it like that because from my PoV the general public has a net benefit from F(L)OSS.
I'm not so sure about that. An actively developed/supported project is often more useful than an abandoned open source one.
If you're prepared to pay market rate for someone to maintain something you should always be able to find someone willing to accept market rate (by definition). This separates the cost of maintenance from costs flowing from rent-seeking behavior.
Arguably industry is always willing to pay, in aggregate, the cost for free software to be maintained, but is not willing to pay, despite the optimism of those who sell it, for the marginal utility it gives them per-customer (which should be much higher). When asked to do so they will simply support free-as-in-beer or cheaper alternatives until one of those becomes the dominant player. This is why successful and heavily commercialized free software projects often seem to be only just clinging on to profitability (eg Docker).
If you're prepared to pay market rate for someone to maintain something you should always be able to find someone willing to accept market rate (by definition).
Are you saying that if you can pay someone to develop their proprietary code for a price you can necessarily find someone to accept the same amount of money for the same work but open sourced? That doesn't seem true. Those are not equivalent offers.
No, I am saying that if a project is open sourced, and there is sufficient demand from people willing to pay for support, maintenance, etc, someone will come along to meet that demand.
If there isn't then the original commercial company was obviously never viable either.
Since an entity getting payment for maintenance can neither expect to collect a monopoly rent for the code, nor is required to pay one to anyone else, the cost of maintenance becomes the market price.
I think your view is too strongly assuming that everyone in the market is perfectly rational and perfectly replaceable with zero transaction costs..
Especially when you start talking about a single person company, it could be as simple as the founder being sentimentally attached to the company and continuing it despite making less than they could with other opportunities, but that doesn't mean that if the founder gets hit by a bus someone else will also be willing to take a sub-optimal gig. Or a company might currently be barely worth running with $20k a month in revenue, but if there is a period of turmoil and lost customers in the process of open-sourcing/founder getting hit by a bus/whatever that now the customer base would only bring in $10k a month, it's no longer profitable, and the market fails to find someone to run the company.
If the code is open sourced, there doesn't need to be a dedicated company behind supporting it. Assuming a compatible license, any party that wants to use can fork it and pay people to maintain it for their own needs without advertising that they "support" the code.
But just because something is open source doesn't mean it's easily maintainable by anyone. It's one thing to install and run it somewhere, but if it needs fixes or customization it quickly becomes necessary to learn and understand the architecture and organization of the code, the data models and structures, etc. and if it was previously the product of a "one man shop" then you're going to have to pay someone to do that learning.
Some products are viable as opensource projects but not as a commercial venture, and the overhead of a business entity might be enough to get out of viability.
Your comment sounds like you think open-source work would be _more_ expensive than closed-source work, or did I misunderstand? That would seem surprising to me.
I would assume some people (clearly a minority) would be willing to take a small pay cut when working on FLOSS.
E.G. could someone be paid slightly less at GitLab versus the same role at GitHub, if they believe in GitLab's principles
There are people who value open source and there are people who value assets. The point is that there isn't a single market rate for the two offers since they aren't the same thing.
> However, it creates an incentive where the general public has an incentive to see the product fail
That's not really the problem. The problem is that it lowers the company value: why should I, potential acquirer, shell out $$$ to get your IP, when I can just sit down and wait for it to come down the river?
Presumably if the technology is good, there is some competitive advantage in retaining sole control over it, or licensing it out.
This seems to make the company more valuable toward the end of life. If you don't buy out your competitor, your customers will have an Open Source alternative.
Most of the value of a company is in the people, structure and brand.
And there's no guarantee the other acquirers will cooperate. "Why should I wait for the company to collapse and open source it's stuff forcing me to compete with other acquirers when I can buy them now and get a monopoly?"
However, it creates an incentive where the general public has an incentive to see the product fail.
Maybe Colin should make tarsnap free for bus drivers? ;)
A commitment is probably not worth much when the entity who committed literally doesn't exist anymore.
it depends, many startups whole purpose for getting founded is getting acquihired, if this the case, then clearly the answer is no
What's the incentive? Startups are created to earn founders money, at least in the form of wages off funding or ideally when acquired/listed. Pledging to open source doesn't work towards that goal.
It’s a lot of work to set something up for being a sustainable, usable OSS project. It certainly doesn’t make sense to invest time in it upfront when your goal is to sell access to it. Afterwards, founders have usually poured everything they have into trying to make the business survive and the work is just unappealing.
Perhaps, but many startups do leverage paid products and components, leaving the open-source product nonfunctional (without a user paying those same licenses). To suggest that the company has an obligation to only use OSS is not reasonable.
isn't it a good idea for a startup to commit to this at the beginning?
The source code is part of a startup’s IP. When a startup fails the IP goes to the investors and debtors who can try to recoup some of their investment by selling the IP.
By the time a company fails, the source code isn’t really theirs to give away any more. They have to hand it over to investors. It’s the same reason a failing startup can’t just give away all of their office furniture or other assets.
Even if we ignore that, releasing source code doesn’t actually do anything for most customers of a SaaS platform. They were paying for the service, not the source code. The source code wasn’t designed for individual use, so self-hosting isn’t going to make sense. Maybe some other group would try to run a company around it, but if the first company failed to become sustainable with the source code it’s less likely that a second company would.
How many open-sourced codebases from failed startups have succeeded as open-source projects? Can you name a single one?
OpenOffice
aka LibreOffice aka StarOffice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
Amazingly, there is still a really cool 90's website athttps://www.staroffice.com! You can even buy a neolithic version of StarOffice!
darn, that _is_ a cool site
Netscape Navigator, which became Mozilla, which became Firefox.
That's not entirely honest. Mozilla basically was an unfinished rewrite, not the original Netscape Navigator, and it was spun out into a foundation during the acquisition. Netscape didn't simply go bankrupt throw its source code into the void for someone to pick it up.
That's not entirely honest.
Better to say not correct, rather than implying dishonesty.
Parse (https://parseplatform.org)
Would Godot count?
Actual Budget (https://actualbudget.org) - I'm not connected to them but I use their software on a daily basis and it's still well maintained.
Blender
OTOH this whole "I didn't value your service enough to pay for it, but now that you failed and open sourced it I'll jump on it" attitude is kind of annoying.
I can absolutely understand startup founders who are a bit spiteful and don't want to give away for free what nobody was interested in buying from them.
It's better for your mental health to instead think "well, at least my loyal, paying customers who believed in me have a path".
True, that's a good counter point. I'll take it :)
Perhaps another option would be to give paying customers an invitation to a private git repo
Open source code is inherently more dependable than proprietary code, in that if the maintainer quits and this tool is crucial for your business, if it's open source you can maintain it yourself (or if it's used by multiple parties, they can pool together to keep maintaining it)
I myself am not interested on any proprietary offerings at this point; this has no relation to any qualities of the proprietary product. It could be awesome for all I know
The first time I've heard of it is today so I can't really have ever given them money to begin with.
But I'd be curious to see the source once it's released, for sure.
Maybe the pricing is off?
There's lots of things I'd use at $n but wouldn't use at $10n
And the corollary of this - if open source didn't exist, the result wouldn't be me paying for lots more products - it would be using lots less products.
Certainly - the advent of paywalls has meant that I mainly don't read those sources. Even the more affordable ones come with a mental tax of deciding to subscribe/cancel, remembering to renew/cancel etc...
I think there’s a lot of people that’ll happily install it if it’s open source, and then do absolutely nothing with it. The same people wouldn’t pay $20/month for the same privilege.
The people to whom itisvaluable are already paying.
PSA - the HN article submitter ("Tomte") is not Placemark's author (Tom MacWright) despite the three matching letters.
Tom M seems to not like HN, so this makes sense.
Either the snippet has a bug, or he changed his mind and removed it, but it’s not working.
Hacker News puts `noreferrer` on the link (because apparently Internet Points and Arguments are more important than the courtesy of respecting the wishes of the author.)
I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was.
Writing for the Hacker News audience makes my writing worse.
Yeah, understandable.
He does have an account here, tho, and is responding to comments.
"Just open source it" is not always a viable option. IP can be locked for one or the other reason, and it is not always in the power of founders to release it.
Building a business around a software is no simple task. You need a lot of 20$ customer to make a leaving and despite the low marginal cost for a user, it's very hard to make people to open their wallet to buy software whereas those same people will go buy expensive servers all the time and won't blink an eye for hardware.
Any chance you could give more info on the size of enterprise customer you were looking at? I've had many people coming to me and only very rarely the rate per hour once you consider everything is more interesting than getting a 9to5 anywhere else.
source: 20% of my income come from sales that relates to my OSS software and I hope one day to get to 100% so I can focus 100% of my time on it
I'm one of the users that is averse to paying even a $10 subscription. The reason is it would be one of the 10-20 subscriptions that are all supposed to be really useful and worth it. For a small startup, this adds up, especially the $10/user one, where now you have to consider all your subscriptions when checking if you have the budget to hire someone new. I with there was a service where I could define a budget, say $500-$1000/month, and pick the services I need from those available on the platform, specify the size of my team, and vendors would bid for this. This service could then provide some form of SSO to these services. You might not get $20/user, but you might get 5%-10% of all the users on this service.
Another problem is that there no way of safeguarding that your SaaS provider won't raise your prices overnight, and migration also costs money and time
Multi-year business contracts have lengthy renewal negotiations. Your saas provider can change rates, but it won't be overnight if you're a business.
US VC backed startup colored glasses: multiyear SaaS contracts. Some people are bootstrapping. And I thought the appeal of SaaS is pay for what you use, and pay as you grow? So now the selling point is buy in bulk?
The selling point is to buy what works for you.
If you know what size user base you have and can estimate usage, buying ahead of time makes sense.
If you're smaller or can't afford a multi-year contract or don't want to get locked into one service, then "pay as you go" makes sense.
That's my point. Capital rich startups are not the subject of this comment. The reason Placemark is failing is not because it could not get one FAANG contract, it's because many small startups/smbs/single person businesses could not pay $20 for it. The comment was to give one reason I believe many SaaS startups today fail to grow, it's because the $20 is a fee for the small guy (otherwise it would be $500 or a contact us button), but the small guy has 100 other $20 subscriptions x employees, so another $20 is more like $1500+20 a month, and maybe the reason they can only afford 2 employees vs 3.
people renegotiate compensation too; knowledge transfer is measured in months to years of salary
Mythical Man Month lays it out crystal clear that you want the smallest team possible, levered up to the hilt and retained long term, because communication overhead between people and teams is the dominant cost factor in orgs of all sizes. The optimal team size is two, given sufficient leverage. SaaS is the leverage.
So how much would you be willing to pay for that service?
Percentage of the total budget obviously. I'd like the same but for streaming, I don't watch enough to keep a monthly subscription on all the services. And hopping is getting tedious. Give me one place where I can watch anything wholesale, and the networks/services bidding for a cut of my subscription. If it works for music why not TV?
One reason is that the risk of investing in creating video media is orders of magnitude higher than audio media, due to the costs being orders of magnitude higher.
And hopping is getting tedious.
I think life is pretty good if all I have to do is set a reminder to click a few buttons.
Well that service probably could charge $20 per user off the top because there would only be one of them :-).
They'd take a fee from vendors.
If you aren’t willing to pay $10 a month for this, frankly you aren’t the customer.
I’m in a small business that pays much more per person for mapping software :)
(10 person team, probably £8k per year spend)
yep, anyone making money off software would be more than happy to pay $10-20 a month.
I'm one of the users that is averse to paying even a $10 subscription.
You're not a target customer.
I'm surprised this software is only $20/user-mth. This isn't "general" software. It solves a specific problem for a specific set of customers - it should be charging way more and going the enterprise route.
a saas is three orders of magnitudes cheaper than a human, in terms of %runway your entire saas budget is like 5 days per year of runway for a 4 person startup. That developer you just hired doesn’t work out? boom in one instant you’re out $50k plus the cumulative time anyone spent spent talking to them. companies will spend huge amounts of money on saas just to get leverage on their 100x higher payroll costs.
Vast majority of subscription pricing is far out of line to software/SaaS cost (not counting venture costs), so apps and web apps have to compete on things other than utility.
You mention a $20 customer. Look at pricing of Google workspaces or Office.
https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...
Version pricing was beneficial to indie builders because users didn't consider the source. (Office still offers that $149 level version pricing.)
Subscription pricing indies try to charge more, often multiples, relative to enterprise incumbents, so anyone who can ship at scale, can make the market unfeasible for indie entrants.
What happens is boutique buyers of indie subs, but not the mass market scale because it's too much to getall theusers.
Look at pricing of Google workspaces or Office.
This is a common mistake in understanding pricing. The reason Office (or consumer apps like Spotify & Netflix) are able to be relatively cheaper is because their addressable market is vastly larger. Larger markets support lower prices, where the winners still end up earning more revenue.
By contrast, smaller niche markets have fewer potential customers over which to amortize their wares. This means that all things equal, those applications will tend to cost more.
As a reductio thought experiment, consider that anyone can buy Microsoft's newest OS, the product of many tens of billions of dollars of R&D, for less than the cost of a tailored suit. But suppose you needed to buy an OS that would only ever run on 50 devices worldwide, how much do you think that would cost?
And yet, your theory is clearly falsified when priced as a one time sale. The larger companies' software costs more, across the board.
Your explanation ought to be true either way, but it isn't.
And it doesn't have to be a thought experiment, there remains just enough single purchase software around to check.
That's because except for "artisanal", "boutique", or "Veblen" products, the user doesn't care about your costs, they care about their utility (and for Veblen, the costisits utility).
Goes back to my initial comment: there are a misleading number of buyers willing to pay too much to "support the artist", as I do in software. But that is a very small addressable market relative to those who will pay for their utility, but not for your failure to scale.
And yet, your theory is clearly falsified when priced as a one time sale.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Could you provide some examples?
Also I should have added the caveat that I'm talking aboutsustainablepricing models.
Yes, there are lots of small companies that don't yet understand how much they need to charge in order to thrive long-term. Those are not great counter-examples, because they represent a creator subsidizing her customers. That can only last so long.
macwright.com domain redirects to google.com for me.
Better source:https://www.placemark.io/post/placemark-is-winding-down
Because of this script tag....
<script>try {
if (document.referrer) {
const ref = new URL(document.referrer);
if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') {
window.location.href = 'https://google.com/';
}
}
} catch (e) { }
</script>That's interesting. I think I read about this website redirecting HN users before.
I can't trigger that redirect on Firefox or Chromium browsers, though. It seems HN puts a `noreferrer` on the link.
Nope, works here on FF.
If you click on the link directly you get to the real page, if you open it in a new tab you land on Google. At least on FF Mobile (Android)
It always opens in a new tab (Desktop) for me, which might be an extension’s doing.
Doesn't work on my Firefox either. Brought me to the real site. I do have all privacy options on, and ublock Origin. So maybe something just deleted the referrer. Or it got deleted because it points to google (I have google container on).
The `rel="noreferrer"` attribute on the link instructs the browser to omit the Referer header on the request. So any browser that respects that option shouldn't be impacted by that code.
https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news- seems intentional
Might be better he redirect to that post specifically but it might defeat the purpose:
It seems to be a filter curate out those who aren't interested or curious enough or able to problem solve why that redirect happened, and how to circumvent it - a low bar but could filter out a lot of noise.
My only note is that it would be nice if it was open sourced before the servers shut down, so that if there were any users who were dependent on it they have time to make a transition.
Still, releasing it is already much better than 98% of companies in this space, and I'd definitely be inclined to use other products by this person because of it.
The concern may be that there could be undiscovered vulnerabilities in the service and releasing the source before shutdown could make it easier for malicious actors to discover those vulnerabilities and compromise user data.
Yes, that's the rationale. A customer has asked about getting access to the source ahead of time and I'll try to make that work.
As I mentioned in another comment, perhaps you could invite current users to a private repo, and then make it public at the business EOL.
If it’s open source, a private repo is not protection. Free software licenses allow for unlimited redistribution.
You don’t need to apply the license until after the public release, before then it would just be sharing code with your customers under whatever agreement you want
Given your setup would it be easy to make a data exporter/importer? That way you could give them the data and shut down before opening the source.
Placemark was built around that idea - all the data is easily exportable & importable in many open formats. It should be straightforward to move to the open source version or other tools.
Fair point. Perhaps if it's such an issue for someone, and they see this news, then they can reach out to Tom to try to remedy it - and perhaps help him test out the open source provided to make sure everything's peachy?
He seems like the type of guy to be willing to reasonable and considerate like this.
Thank you, that looks good!
While I appreciate them releasing their stuff at all, why do companies usually also shut down at the same time as they are gaining a really cool differentiator over their competitors?
Is that actually a thing? I don't think I've heard of a pattern like that
Because people are more willing to be take audacious risks when things look like they will inevitably fail. It gives a sense of freedom to a project.
Giving up is the first step to success. That's when you stop trying and start doing.
That's an interesting mechanism. If you know if there are any numbers on how often that happens?
This is pretty anecdotal. We'd have to come up with ways to quantify it.
The story of the failing company taking a moonshot or making risky bets is pretty common.
This sounds like something that there'd be an HBS logo on, it likely already exists. It's a fairly easy thesis project.
There's an LLM that does conceptual searching of scholarly literaturehttps://consensus.app/search/but it looks like just a classic IDF/bag of words style approach labeled "ML"
I guess the reasoning goes:
* I can't make enough money out of it
* do I keep this as a side project?
* if yes: development mostly stops
* if no: OK, shut down
* now that I don't fear competition, I can Open Source it
(not commenting on how valid each of these is, which is probably very hard to judge without the founder's perspective).
I love the Chatwoot success story:
[Chatwoot] was a product we started building in 2017. It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. [...] It was in an inactive mode for around 1 and a half years. Recently we thought of putting it out instead of letting the code to rust. Our idea is to make it something like Gitlab/Mattermost where people can host their own version and we will provide a hosted version for people who don't want to self-host.
After we open-sourced, we received contributions from 30 developers all around the world.
And then they proceeded to raise $1.6 million in seed round.
Pricing seems strange. $20/user per month. But you'd need someone else to also pay so that you can collaborate. So $40/month minimum? Seems quite a barrier.
It is a very specialised GIS tool, isnt it? So that price doesn't look like a barrier to me. Sounds more like a smaller market with already established tools, perhaps?
I haven't checked if it was the case, but organisation type of license with a pack of users could have worked well.
Maybe, or you end up with "yeah, the placemark login details are in the shared password vault"
right, and then some time in the future the algorithm determines hey these people are obviously sharing the login, and they are totally hooked now!
The first year's supply of hits isn't free, but it's pretty cheap if you cheat a bit, and you figure since you're cheating a bit it will be cheap forever so why not get hooked!?
I'm not saying it's bad, just I've worked at some places that do this and you know the company they are doing it to know they're doing it, but accepting it at the moment.
"It is a very specialised GIS tool, isnt it?"
I wouldn't call it very specialised. Seems like a fairly general tool for visualising and manipulating GeoJSON and similar data? I actually need to create/manipulate a GeoJSON data set myself for a current project, so I think I'll try this out!
Another application you discover from reading necrolog.
What is necrolog, a blog for dead SaaS?
Obituary. necrolog is coming from French and is used in some languages, Russian for example.
What's that?
Looks a bit too ambitious. Was it really necessary to provide collaborative real-time editing? This feature seems way over the top.
I understand every startup wants to have a killer feature which creates unique selling proposition, but this seems like something that probably took way too much effort and wasn't really demanded. But this is only my assumption.
Collaborative UXs are much easier to "get right" then they used to be. There are a great many libraries to help like yjs. We added it to a prosemirror based block editor, including polish like multiple cursors and fun things like that, in less than a week.
Awesome! Thanks for the insight.
That's a fair assumption. There were some customers who benefited from real-time editing, but it was a big tech bet and led to a design that was harder to scale for larger datasets.
Oh, that’s sad. Placemark was a very nice as it was for collecting geographical objects where the associated data is well structured. This is always a hurdle when integrating the generated data into other systems.
My coop has been working with something resembling to placemark:https://cocarto.combut our business model is not to sell it as a SaaS (which is always very difficult, and requires a lot of capital to reach enough customers) but sell a service to companies and administration around it. That’s why it’s FOSS from the beginning.
but sell a service to companies and administration around it. That’s why it’s FOSS from the beginning.
This doesn't work for everyone, some startups can't afford to put two thirds of the resources on providing support. I think it's sad that there usually no middle way to structure your business with FOSS in mind.
I agree. That’s our choice, mostly because of our background as service provider (we usually charge by time) it’s in our comfort zone while we are uncomfortable in marketing and trying to get 1000 recurring paying customers. Everyone is different.
And yes, I’m frustrated that living from doing FOSS is hard. And it is also hard to spend only 1 day/week to do smaller contributions…
Can someone shed some light on what happens monetarily to bootstrapped company founders? How many of them are offering personal collateral on loans vs some form of angel investing? I'm finding it hard to square open sourcing something if someone just lost decades of savings or the value in their home, so I'm curious if there's some way they're getting funding for their companies that doesn't ruin them if things like this happen. The tone is also very, "I lost dreams but not my livelihood" in many of these statements and I'm curious how.
I did consulting for the first 8 months of development, and then the company roughly broke even for operational costs since day one. I built most things myself which led to lower costs. My main cost was just rent and health insurance, which in America, self-employed, is both expensive and useless. I had savings from working for a decade in tech and minimized other costs. So, lucky position to be in, but also your average startup's monthly burn is enormous compared to what you can do by being scrappy.
Common situations for founders who describe themselves as bootstrapped:
- doing consulting work on the side
- living off savings
- having a spouse with income
For bootstrapped companies in the software or SaaS space without employees there should be minimal start-up costs compared to say, opening a restaurant. The real loss is opportunity costs: what salary or equity you could have earned as an alternative.
Small companies are often happy with a free tier of a service provided by big corporations. This perverse gatekeeping makes it hard for newcomer startups to compete and just get their foot in a door.
It also allows newcomer startups to exploit the free tier and create a business with only time investment.
For anyone else who follows along in this domain, there's an interesting competitor in the space I stumbled across recently:https://felt.com/
Pretty nice looking product and robust feature set. Love to see GIS tooling becoming more accessible.
I am going to a GIS conference and I saw Felt on the list of sessions. Didn't know what it was until now.
Val (https://val.town), the new project you're working on is super cool!
Been playing around with it for the last couple of months and have been delighted with it :)
Tells more about the founders than the product itself!
Great! I'm sorry it didn't work out!
It looks like nice tool. Shame it didn't work out in the end.
I think he should try selling it to Google. It would nicely integrate in their suite of Docs + Sheets + My Maps.
Such a great product! I am sorry that it didn't work out and thanks for open sourcing it!
I'd never heard about Placemark yet this fills a gap I've been seeing in the mapping market having worked in local government - data management in ArcGIS is $$$, awful, and limited to a handful of GIS specialists, while Felt has nowhere near the data capabilities like joining and transformations that Placemark has. The real money in mapping is from enterprise & government, which requires a lot of upfront work to sell to. Hopefully other companies in the space (like Scribble Maps, Felt, or Esri via ArcGIS Online) fill in some of the feature gaps left by Placemark.
Placemark was such a great map editor in a collaborative environment. Sad to see it shut down.
I’ve used Placemark for well over a year to build custom map-based graphics for torontoverse.com. There are a lot of web apps in this space now, and always QGIS, but I personally felt Placemark struck the right balance between simplicity and power.
Thanks for building it!
I wonder how long before a company does this; then the software gains traction because it's open and free, so they re-incorporate and re-license the software.
Or have I not been paying enough attention, and this already happened?
I didn’t know about the app but this is a great shutdown post. Clear and to the point, no corporate bs around failure to monetize (the dreaded “macroeconomic environment”, a reasonable period of transition for customers as well as a price discount (free!), and obviously last but not least open-sourcing.
It is the kind of post that would make me trust the founder to become a customer of their next project.
Thank you for committing to release it all as open source, instead of hoarding it or putting it in the bin like so many other services do when they fail to achieve sustainability.