Comment by arekkas

Hello, founder of Ory (https://github.com/ory) here. I‘ve spent 5+ years writing code, never thinking anyone would pay for it. Today, Ory is a healthy business but the road there was extremely stressful.

I‘ve felt the same as you many times over, and I have had bad experiences along the way. In the end it still feels that it was worth it. I get to own and work on things I enjoy.

For me, taking on VC capital was the stepping stone for today‘s success, but that was necessary due to the complexity of IAM and the system criticality it has (single point of failure). It’s essentially impossible to do something like Ory without outside money.

Generally speaking I felt that libraries are harder to monetize than APIs, but looking at your website you already have a service! Monetize the service, keep the OSS free (but maybe don’t make everything OSS).

One thing we open source people are bad at is valuing our own work (because we publish it for free). But experience has shown me that people are willing to pay if the service is valuable enough even if you can get it for free otherwise. So many companies spend 100k, 200k, 2M ln bad software. Why should they not spend 100k with your good product?

If you don’t want to have a boss and don’t want to live on someone else’s terms (yes VCs, customers and others tell you what you SHOULD do, but you can still do it differently and they will applaud you when it works), keep doing what you‘re doing and don‘t be afraid to ask MORE money for it, not less.

To get to 250k to support yourself, you will have to sell a lot of subscriptions. So maybe the value lies elsewhere? Integrations, customization? Number of form fills? Bot protection? Your customers/adopters typically tell you what‘s valuable - but don’t do it all for free!

Looking at your repo it has some traction, but you probably need to build it up a bit more with marketing (wether that‘s cool new tech, or just posting it in the right places is up to you). If you have a couple of companies that are interested in using it and need support, sell them support for 10k, 20k, 30k a year and learn what they need, build it, and sell it to them again. Why build stuff for free if the customer is making money with it?

I believe you can do this!

If you are bootstrapped, don‘t try to mimic typeform subscriptions will only work with sufficient capital and a lot of upselling. Self-service subscription selling is hell and requires huge infra and marketing budgets. Try to find a couple of customers that pay you well and expand from there.