alt Hacker NewsWrite some software, give it away for free
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Or don't. I've done both, published OSS projects and sold some software. The level of entitlement in some comments I received on the OSS side was pretty crazy at times. While with the paid software, all of the interactions I had were so much more constructive. YMMV, but willingness to pay is a great filter.
I don't think this debate has an easy answer. Yes, not everything should be about money, but yes, we all need to make money to survive.
I think we all agree the answer isn't, "No one should make any money writing software." I also think we can agree that the answer isn't, "you should charge money for every bit of software you write."
So how do we decide which is which?
I don't want to stop being a professional software developer. I have loved being able to support myself and my family by doing my favorite activity. It has let me enjoy going to work every day for over 20 years.
I also don't think I should charge for random code work that I do for fun, though. I am not trying to monetize every minute of my day... but I do want to monetize enough of it that I can pay my mortgage, buy food, save for my retirement, and have some fun along the way.
I don't know exactly where I am going with this, but it is my gut reaction when I see a post about how horrible it is to make money off of writing software. It has to be more nuanced than that.
I got burned with an attitude like this: unexpectedly, people who had downloaded my open source tool for free started expecting support. Some of them sent pretty unfriendly emails.
Really the problem boils down to:
“I don’t want to maintain a custom fork with my fix” - valid sure, if you are not sure if your fix is the best solution for it, and would like the general community to comment (i think the problem here is that iterating on a fork is generally difficult to discover and work on)
“I really want everyone to have the benefit of this fix” - Could be interpreted as wanting the "fame" of authorship or participation in a large open source repo, otherwise just sharing the fix and letting whoever needs it is enough tbrh.
“I don’t know what the fix is, but there is a bug here and the core team should fix it” - would be a user support issue.
If I was going to write something for free, it would some weird itch-scratching thing for Plan 9 or something, it wouldn't be something most people would ever want.
Realistically though, I'm not going to build software for free any more than I'm going to tidy someone's garden for free.
FOSS has delivered some great software, it's also demonetised a lot of areas where software developers could be earning a living. I don't think software developers should feel any need to give away their efforts than any other professional should.
FOSS has created pricing race to the bottom in software, and taken away financial incentive for improvement, it's not a 100% net positive.
I started out in the BBS and demoscene of the 90s. The glory days of computing in my opinion, because of the technical innovation (people were making magic with 7mhz processors) and how the community arranged itself. e.g, some ANSI artists in the artpack scene went on to become legit artists, but nobody was sitting around grinding ANSIs to make millions or raise capital. I think about that era in my own open source work today, I just work on what I enjoy and find interesting and whatever happens happens as long as I can pay the bills.
I resonate with this blog post a lot.
I think there is something to be said for monetizing ones' hobbies, but I've recently been taking some forays into this world of "build something amazing and give it away for free" as well. I recently took a very big experimental plunge in this path, and I'm curious how well it will work out for me.
Open-source state-of-the-art Magic: The Gathering card identification pipeline:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHieOcmC7Dw
I used to do this kind of image recognition for a living, but I've been out of the business for a little while now. I had some ideas for a different approach from what I've done in the past and decided to code it up. This version is far better than anything else I've ever done -- especially for scanning against busy backgrounds or with occlusions, and also for noticing fine differences between otherwise difficult-to-distinguish printings.
I didn't have any interested customers waiting for this, so -- much like the OP -- decided to create an experiment and release it open source. I'm not opposed to having paths to monetize it (for people who want to license it for closed-source commercial projects), but I'm not trying to commercialize it so much as I would love to see how far we can take it with open-source.
I don't know which path I should take with this.
The biggest downside is that I feel like I've had a hard time getting people to be as interested in this project as I would have expected -- I believe this truly is the best identification software available (I've built some benchmarks to test it [0]), and maybe the market is just a bit flooded for such things (?), but I suspect that one very strong problem is that if you don't charge for something, then there is a perceived lack of value.
Sometimes I wonder if I would have more interest in this project if I _weren't_ trying to give it away.
For me, that's been the most negative aspect about releasing this for free so far.
I also running an open source software I developed for free. It's one of my hobby so it helps too. Issues or suggestions are no problems, I can choose what I want to fix or implement.
A free software can have good things like there could be a lot of users which is good learning experience on how to deal with it. If you are already experienced, then it would not be as much valuable.
There is also argument that paid software is better. I can't say that it wrong. With less people using it, and the developer has fund to run the service on good machine does make a difference.
I don't think there a right answer to free or paid. Just do it the way that align with your goal.
A lot of comments can't help but mention the constant looming threat of potentially permanent destitution that pervades our society. It's increasingly hard to understand the position of people who think that this is a feature, excepting of course those very few with the resources to use that pressure rather than be driven by it
> If software development is treated as a vehicle for self-exploration, rather than just a means to a financial end, this makes a lot more sense. From my experience, it also generally produces better software that doesn't come with user hostile (value extracting) actions or features because there's no expectation of a financial return.
I strongly identify with all of this. I started programming computers when I was about 7, so now I've been doing it for decades.
I sort of accidentally made it a career for a few years, because I was really good at it, but I didn't like being a professional software developer for a huge tech company.
I still like writing code though, and view it primarily as a means for exploration, figuring out how things work and explaining and systematizing them for myself and for others.
This post misses that the people selling their "I built" SaaS advertised as a hobby/passion-project are just marketing something as indie that they fully intended to get rich from the beginning. It was never even a hobby worth giving away for free, it was always an attempt at making an easy fortune because they bought into the dream that infra was selling.
I'm mostly retired from a lifetime as a graphics programmer and CTO, and now I'm working through my lifetime of fun backlog projects. https://pcons.org, https://deep-timeline.org, https://pelorus-nav.com, https://packzen.org, https://github.com/garyo/sea-surface-temp-viz, https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com/ and lots more. All open source and free.
Sure, make money from software. I did. But when you have enough and it's time to give back, open source it.
This is a wonderful ideal. Like some ancient scientists and philosophers, they don't have many worries about money and can pursue pure passion. This also seems like a key source of social progress -- diverse purposes and paths of exploration.
I'm doing exactly this. I started out only intending to create something for myself. As it got better, I thought that other people might want to use it. I briefly considered trying to sell it, and pretty quickly realized that I didn't want to ruin something I was having fun with by turning it into a business.
Now, instead of worrying about sales, I get to feel good about giving something back to the FOSS community that has given me so much.
I recognize that it is a position of privilege to be able to dedicate so much of my time to a project that gives me nothing financially... and in fact costs me money to produce. No shade at all to people who are not so lucky and need to sell what they make.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's what I'm working on. Feature-wise it's come a long way since the last HN post about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46619391
And if you're not interested, that's OK, because I'm not trying to sell you anything!
Only if people do - "grow some grain and give it for free, manufacture some products and give it for free, provide some service and don't charge for it". If everyone does all of those as hobbies, then we are good.
I wonder if you'd also be arguing for libre software to reject available funding? What's the difference?
The Ruby on Rails foundation brings in a million per year: https://rubyonrails.org/foundation
The Linux foundation is funded at around $250m / year from a quick Google search
I just interviewed somebody who works for mac productivity app that has been around forever. For many years it worked as a simple one to two person operation and then they took some money and started to try and scale the business. But it is an idiosyncratic product that has a small number of highly passionate users. They tried to make it a platform. They tried to sell it in bulk. None of this makes sense for the product and the team responsible for it knows it will never work.
This kind of mentality is easy to have when you make 6 figures and don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. For the majority of the world, which makes a median of $10 USD per day, monetization is the only way they can do things they enjoy. There's no "hobbies" for most of humanity if its detached from survival.
Even in these comments I keep hearing the same complaint: "when you do open source people come asking for support and complaining about your software"
I don't get why this is such an issue. You can just ignore these people if you don't want to interact with them. You shouldn't take bug reports or support requests personally.
This has always confounded me when presented as a first choice when developing something with value. I can't think of any other fields with so much practical value where all participants are practically shamed for not giving away something that is identical to their most commercially valuable skill.
Most of my life has been financed by closed source products I developed on my own to fill a real need and others had it too. Had I given them away, the best I could have hoped for was what, a job offer?
That's completely and absolutely fine, if you are millionaire and/or have other well paid job then.. well done, congratulations and enjoy your newly found hobby.
BUT - I'm capable to tinker with my car a bit, to service and repair my bike, to bake a bread - BUT I'm not visiting mechanic shops, bike service shops and bakeries in my city telling owners that they should work for free and give away results of their work.
It's easy to have that view when giving away something not that many people are interested in. Once you're a platform full of media, entertainment and social connection you have to find a way to keep serving billions of users.
Great read, explains the issues I have with modern software well. As a matter of fact I am planning to release an App on the Google Playstore just so my mom can use it and has an easier time of installing it. The server is about 15€/month but I dont really care about the expenses. I just want her to have an easier time.
I love the attitude, but this particular service in 2026 is a little risky.
A whole range of content can be posted that can make you liable that you want it or not... from product keys, to internal documents, ...
I'll just say this, I love the spirit but this is ballsy. It's just going to be used as another user-paste space.
I have taken a road somewhere between FOSS and paid software. I have a data management system that has been in a 'free open beta' for a few years now. Anyone can download it and try it for free.
Right now it can be used as a great tool or analyzing data. Feedback is appreciated but not expected. I try to respond to bug fixes and feature requests in a timely manner, but I am not required to do that.
If it catches on, I might charge something like $10 for an individual lifetime license. Businesses might be on some kind of subscription.
As this is FOSS, I don't see why you need the security review (by who, with what qualifications?). Any users can look at the source code and arrange their own reviews as they think necessary.
All my personal software is MIT licensed. Selling software isn't my bag, baby.
With AI it feels writing software that is open is less attractive. It's hard to trust OSS made recently b/c you can tell if someone knows what they're doing and even spent any time on quality. Also, often times people don't reach for software others make (unless it's boring and old stuff, in which case this advice doesn't apply.)
One of the room elephants: Most free software projects will have 0 users beyond the author.
This is why I'm building free "spite apps" in homage to Larry David's spite stores [0]. The goal being to push back on enshitification of tech and dark patterns like mandatory subscriptions, ads and user data tracking.
As a solo indie-dev, writing free software (as in you don't need to pay anything) is fine, but I usually do not make the project (entirely) open source due to the added churn & maintenance.
In my experience, setting expectations early in my apps ("I'm a solo indie dev", "this is a free app", "you can reach out to me through email but don't expect super quick responses") helped reduce entitled users and - quite the opposite - people were super happy to get replies from me solving their problems.
[0] Blog post about it: https://sxp.studio/blog/spite-apps-the-latte-larrys-of-apps
All my publicly available code on GitHub dot com is available for free for anyone to clone and copy.
What is not free is my time, my attention, and support. I don't know how open source maintainers do it but I can't imagine doing it for free.
Everyone is commenting on the blog but not the service. I remain skeptical:
A. Either it will remain obscure and not see any real use
B. (Less likely) It will get abused to hell before it is shutdown.
Claims of removing violating content “immediately” seem unrealistic under decent usage, unless that $600 can grow unbounded.
I would love to write open source software for a living. So far, I haven't worked out how.
The final three paragraphs really struck a chord with me. Nicely said. Thanks!
Wish there was a way to send this to every mobile dev who thinks they can (and should) charge a subscription for their hobby app that provides a basic function
I don’t need money but I run some moderately successful open source projects. The users are very demanding.
i do it here https://github.com/agentify-sh/
but have no idea how to get any compensation
i just do it because i use these tools and like to share it
> Debian-based Linux (Raspberry Pi OS, KDE Neon, Pop_OS, etc. - not Ubuntu)
Why not Ubuntu?
Hey author, thank you for blocking text selection on your site!
Do you mind describing why?
I always hoped that AI would enable people to take paid software and remake it so they could give it away for free. I started developing websites about 20 years ago back then apart from the big name software and Ide’s. Everything was free. Nowadays everything is a subscription.
I just did this for a MacOS+iOS universal app that lets you take quick notes - and keeps them in Markdown files on your Mac's filesystem (so agents can parse them)
> It cost about $600 USD to release, mostly due to two initial security reviews.
Can someone expand on this? I've given software away free and it didn't cost me anything.
> Most projects don't need a team of 3+ engineers, they should stay hobby projects.
I don't have a problem with this, but there is still the cost of living; and renumeration possibilities for time spent and invested into a given project.
Something should be done to improve the ecosystem situation here, even if the renumeration is low.
This is the reason why developers here are upset about AI. You can't have it both ways and 'open source' is now weaponized against them.
AI will consume OSS software and anyone will be able to clone your closed-source app for free and open source it for 'the community' to avoid paying $1 to maintain it.
One thing that is not free is hosting.
I've built side projects for years. My most recent one (also Markdown related [1]) is my first open source one and I've found it to be the most rewarding experience by far. So far I have 54 stars on GitHub and have had people emailing me mainly to thank me for the service, but some to ask for feature requests. Although I haven't had many ask for features / fixes, I find the "pushy-ness" of my users very useful as it helps me know what to implement next. This is doubly true as the cost of implementing is economically and cognitively lower than it was before AI was around. I'm pretty happy to build the features my users want, and it's great to see that some proportion of people exposed to the tool use it on a weekly/daily basis [2].
[1] https://sdocs.dev, discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
[2] https://sdocs.dev/analytics