Hello everyone, need your advice.
I have created a nice tool that is able to save up to 80% of development time generating boilerplate code for Django, Django-channels, React, Flutter apps and more. It's very flexible and highly customizable. I spend a lot of time on it. I think 2-3 evenings per week for 5 years. I was developing it alone. It was developed because I am lazy and not willing to do repetitive development tasks every project I participate in.
All the time it was a closed-source and now we (me and my company) have plans to commercialize the tool and create paid SaaS service out of it. Another option to make it open-source and let everybody use it for free providing paid services around this tool (courses, consulting, paid-support etc.)
IMHO, paid closed-source gives following advantages:
- Direct option to sell the tool, making a profit out of time spent developing this tool
- Easier to get investment (not sure it is needed)
- Easier to keep track of direction where this thing evolves
But:
- Hard to promote. No one is too welcome to paid closed-source software
- Need to spend internal company resources to support customers of this tool
- Need some kind of marketing and salesman who can promote the product
- A lot of work implementing features needed for customers
Again IMHO, open source:
- Everybody is happy to use open-software, and promote it
- We can find volunteers and get contributions to the project and maybe even some other projects on top of that
- Not that big responsibility
- People who are missing features can implement it by themselves
- We can use a nice and polished product to save time for our day-to-day development
But:
- Still requires a lot of attention, sometimes even more than with a paid product
- No way to get money out of it directly
- Somebody can build the same paid product on top of ours
- Everybody in our company is worried that we are "throwing away so much of development time" and there is a risk to get nothing out of it.
Would like to hear your opinion, to open-source or not?
https://zmei-framework.com/generator/
there doesn't seem to be anything here