He Started Charging For His Free Tool, Now Earns $6,000/Month

Andris Reinman is the founder of EmailEngine, a self-hosted email automation platform 📧

A recent article he wrote: How I turned my open-source project into a business

It begins…

When I started writing and publishing open-source software about 15 years ago, I was pretty radical about it… Getting another A-category company to use my open-source libraries like Nodemailer was a badge of honor…

I even went so far that when a founder of a major transactional email service sent me an email regarding Nodemailer and offered to make a donation to promote my efforts, I rejected it.

😱 But then…

A startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars.

I was financially not in a good place back then, and when I saw the news, I started to wonder – what did I get out of this?

Sending email notifications was a huge part of that service, and they probably sent millions of email notifications a day using Nodemailer.

At the very least, I saved them tons of developer hours by providing a free and solid library for sending these emails.

So even though Andris’ work was used, he didn’t make any $$ as he gave it away for free.

Then came EmailEngine.

That was also open source initially, but with a paid option…

The subscription fee was 250€ per year…

Well, it turns out my business plan was bonkers. I only gained a few paying subscribers…

After a year and a half and 750€ in total revenue, I decided to jump ship — enough of providing free stuff.

He pivoted…

I re-designed the UI of the app to look more professional and implemented a license key system [for paying subscribers]… I also changed the license… to a commercial license.

👍 That worked a lot better…

I kept the price the same, 250€ per year, and during the first month, I sold 1750€ worth of subscriptions.

That’s like twice the amount I made in the previous year and a half, and it sealed the fate of the project.

Next, I started to increase the pricing; 250€ became 495€, then 695€ and 795€, and finally 895€.

🤑 Nowadays, Andris finally has a profitable project…

The current MRR for EmailEngine is 6100€ [$6,622] and grows steadily, which in Estonia, where I live, allows me to pay myself a decent salary so that I can work on my project full-time.

The only regret I have is that I did not start selling my software earlier and only published free, open-source software…

Selling to business customers is definitely more reliable and predictable than depending on the goodwill of random people.

I can relate to what he’s saying here. 

I started out way too idealistic with my business as well, and suffered because of it.

One way to check if you’re being too idealistic: study what established players are doing, see if any are thriving with an approach similar to what you have in mind.

Or can you at least find someone doing it successfully in another industry? 🤔

If not, it’s probably not a good path to go down.