🔓 Do products benefit from being open source?
We’re not building an open-source product ourselves, and that’s exactly why we thought - let’s talk about it =)
Open source can bring a lot to a product: transparency, community, trust, contributions, and sometimes a completely different way of building distribution.
But it also comes with its own challenges.
You’re opening the code to everyone. Others can build on top of it, fork it, or even create competing products. And if the product is a business, there’s also the question of how you actually monetize it ?
Still, there’s something powerful about building in public and letting people see, use, improve, and contribute to what you’re creating.
So I’m curious about:
Does open source actually give a product a meaningful advantage?
Or does it mostly make sense for certain types of products and communities?
Replies
I think it depends a lot on the product, open source works great when the value is trust and community around the code itself, but for something where the actual product is the service, staying closed probably makes more sense. Distribution-wise its interesting though, people build in public and it becomes marketing on its own
RunEvr
@samran_elahi Thank you for always being in my threads! I’m really looking forward to your answers =)
Yes, you’re right - it’s kind of a marketing channel too.
And what about monetization? How do you think about it?
@adana I think probably open core, keep the base free and open but charge for the enterprise features, support, or hosting. It gives you the trust and community benefit without giving away the part that actually pays the bills.
RunEvr
Solo founder of a closed-source scheduler here, so take my bias into account — but I've come to think "open source" is a distribution strategy, not a virtue, and it only pays when your users and your potential contributors are the same people. Dev tools, infrastructure, libraries: open the code, because the person evaluating you can read it and might fix your bugs. Consumer or prosumer SaaS: your users can't read the code and don't want to — opening it mostly arms competitors while giving your actual customers nothing they can feel.
What I found is you can get most of the benefits people attribute to open source without opening the repo: build in public (I post my failures, my usability-test results, my pricing math), adopt open standards instead of open code — we implemented MCP so any AI assistant can drive our product, and that plugged us into a community and ecosystem overnight without making us forkable — and be radically transparent about pricing and limits, which is where the trust actually comes from.
So my answer to your question: meaningful advantage, yes — but only for products whose community can contribute. For everyone else, open behavior beats open source.