Ask HN: How Do You Sell an Open Source Project?

5 points by joeblau 5 years ago

I've been running Gitignore.io for 7 years now, but I'm looking to roll off of it and focus on other projects. Right now the time commitment for this site is about 5 hours a month as most of the site is automated. The site generates about $60 a month in revenue from the an ad partnership and the site sees about 85,000 MAU's. In terms of cost, the site costs $0 to run on a free Heroku Dyno and the only cost is the annual .io TLD registration which is covered in one month. I've been trying to sell the project but I'm not really sure how to go about doing that — I would love some feedback if anyone has any experience selling their project.

stevekemp 5 years ago

I suspect the open-source nature is largely irrelevant. You'll want to list it on sideprojectors, flippa.com, etc.

But $60/profit per month I expect you'd not receive much more than $500 as an offer. You might prefer to shutter the service than see the main site go closed for that amount of money.

  • joeblau 5 years ago

    Thanks for the advice — I'll try that.

altsyset 5 years ago

Have you tried submitting to sites like sideprojectors?

  • joeblau 5 years ago

    Not yet but I'll try that.