Feb 29, 2024 07:00:00

A software developer who turned into an entrepreneur with a monthly income of 1 million yen by charging for open source projects

The technologies that make up the Internet depend on the support and dedication of many people working on open source projects. Andris Reinman, a software developer who created the email client '

EmailEngine ,' wrote on his blog how he transitioned from being an open source project author to a developer of paid APIs and how that turned out.

How I turned my open-source project into a business
https://docs.emailengine.app/how-i-turned-my-open-source-project-into/

Mr. Reinman, an Estonian engineer, first launched an open source project in 2010, about 15 years ago at the time of writing this article.

Mr. Reinman, who developed

Nodemailer , an email sending module for Node.js applications, granted Nodemailer only a loose license such as the MIT license and made it widely available as open source.

At the time, Reinman considered it an honor to have Nodemailer used as an open source library by a large company, and even turned down a donation offer sent to him by email from the founder of a major email service. there was.

However, Mr. Reinman throws away his past self, saying, ``Looking back, how stupid I was.''

The trigger for the change was that a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for $500 million (approximately 75 billion yen at the time of article creation). Reinman, who was in financial trouble at the time, realized that the free Nodemailer was saving many developers time and helping them send millions of emails a day. Realizing that his pockets remained empty, he decided to make a major change in his approach.

Thus, Mr. Reinman, who developed the software that became EmailEngine, released this project, then called 'IMAP API', under

the LGPL license . We also prepared an MIT licensed version, but to obtain it you would have to subscribe to an annual subscription of 250 euros (approximately 40,000 yen).

However, this business plan got off to a poor start, and the total revenue was only 750 euros (about 120,000 yen) in one and a half years. That's because companies had no interest in licensing, and only a handful of people who subscribed genuinely wanted to support Mr. Lineman.

Mr. Reinman felt that he had had enough of free releases, so he updated the IMAP API's UI to look more professional, switched the license from LGPL to a commercial license, introduced a license key system, and released it as EmailEngine.

The relaunched EmailEngine didn't even have a trial option, and the price remained unchanged at 250 euros per year, but when it achieved revenue of 1,750 euros (about 285,000 yen), more than double the original amount, in the first month of release, the project's direction changed. has solidified.

Mr. Reinman doubled the subscription fee from 250 euros to 495 euros (about 80,000 yen), and finally raised the price to 895 euros (about 150,000 yen), but the number of customers did not decrease and sales increased. I went. Regarding the reason for this, Mr. Reinman says, ``Expenses of less than 1,000 euros (about 160,000 yen) are not a big deal for companies, so only profits have improved.''

At the time of article creation, EmailEngine's monthly recurring revenue (MRR) was 6,100 euros (approximately 1 million yen), and revenue was growing steadily, and Mr. Lineman began working on this project full time. Mr. Lineman's only regret is that he should have sold his project as paid software sooner rather than releasing it for free as open source.

'It's definitely more reliable and predictable to sell products to business customers than to rely on the goodwill of a large number of people,' Reinman wrote at the end of his blog.