For example, many of us use Calendly. There are many for-profit Calendly alternatives. Could we band together and create an open-source, truly free Calendly alternative where users split hosting costs in a fair way? The cost for functionality would go down to pennies per user, since no one expects to make a profit. I don't necessarily want to take on the whole burden of self-hosting an open-source platform, but would be happy to pay for usage if those funds only go towards keeping the platform online.
Just curious if some such experiment has been successful, or perhaps why they fail.
As for the Calendly alternative instance - have you heard of cal.com? It's free for individuals.
I recently wrote this article featuring their origin story: <https://blog.scoutflo.com/cal-com-the-coolest-open-source-al...>
I love the Cal.com story. What gives me some pause is that they're VC-backed. $25M Series A. The free tier might be great, and I might come to rely upon it. But they're expected to produce an outsized ROI, and the traditional SaaS play is to give it away for free to capture the market and then raise prices. I'd much prefer a community-driven effort where we have no ROI expectations, so it can remain low-cost forever as we're just splitting overhead.
we will never raise prices for the free plan, free stays free, especially since it's open source which means if we were to raise, it would compete with the self-hosted product and we really dont want that
rest assured, we are comfortable providing a free product with enterprise customers
You'll also find something called OSS Friends on this page - featuring more COSS startups in the ecosystem.
Another noteworthy one is Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/
It's not quite as good as something like a self-hosted instance of Mattermost or even Rocket.Chat, but honestly if you already have Nextcloud, then it's pretty cool to be able to get something decent like that up and running quickly.
Ofc that's making Nextcloud a single point of failure in some ways and occasionally things can go sideways with these plugin based platforms (historically applies more to installs of Jenkins, but also have had some performance issues with Nextcloud that had lots of apps, too).
I still rather like Nextcloud because of being able to just run it on my servers and replace a bunch of other third party cloud platforms and still somehow manage to have good enough uptime and security.
I wonder what other cool self-hosted platforms are out there, maybe some of what Odoo has (cool idea but a bit underwhelming last I checked): https://github.com/odoo/odoo and https://www.odoo.com/
Or something in: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
I do have a lot of eggs in one basket with NC, but I have never had any issues. After running it for years, I am impressed with the rate of development of new features and apps. Whatever someone's experience was with it a year ago or so should be revisited with the latest version.
Problem is that all parts of this process needs funding, which makes it difficult to make work. Someone needs to run the physical infrastructure, someone needs to operate the paas platfrom, someone needs to develop/maintain the paas platform codebase, someone needs to develop the actual applications, and someone needs to maintain the application packaging/deployment stuff. And all those someones should somehow get fair market-rate compensation for the work they do.
One way of providing compensation is to hand out credits for the service, but in practice it is probably infeasible to make the numbers really work out. And even if all the labor is compensated through service credits, you still need actual real money flowing in to pay for colo and hardware etc, which probably needs to come from the otherwise non-contributing userbase.
Not saying it is completely impossible thing to accomplish, but it is really difficult to bootstrap, and almost as difficult to keep running sustainability, especially when individual people inevitably come and go.
It's a natural extension of Framasoft, where they opened up their concept so that they were not a single point of failure.
The providers are almost exclusivey based in Europe currently[2], likely due to the French origins of Framasoft. But there's no reason it has to stay thay way.
[1] https://www.chatons.org/ [2] https://www.chatons.org/search/near-me
Running a SaaS reliably involves a lot more than just the open source app.
Who's going to handle DevOps and Security, product road map, paying for hosting, transactional emails, etc.
A SaaS is a business, has expenses, needs revenue.
