Beekeeper Studio was released in 2020 as a 100% free and open source project.
We spent 8 months of evenings and weekends making that initial version. We’d released other apps before that no-one used, but Beekeeper was different - as soon as we released it and started to share it, people were interested and started downloading and using it.
The interest was so great that we ended up on the front page of Hacker News, we’d posted earlier that day but hadn’t really paid much attention to it, within a couple of hours we had thousands of early users.
But then came the hard part - maintaining and improving a real app, used by real people….for how long? Years? Decades?
The open source graveyard
Most projects/apps/businesses are ultimately unsuccessful and die. This isn’t really unique to open source projects, but it’s more pronounced in open source. After all, from the start most open source projects are meant to be free. That’s quite a hurdle to making a project sustainable.
In fact, we made Beekeeper Studio because a much beloved tool, Sequel Pro become abandonware, even though it was the best database app I’d ever used.
Who wanted SequelPro to die? Certainly not me. Certainly not the thousands of other people who used it every day. I wanted the opposite - I wanted to use it on Linux, and with PostgreSQL.
I would have happily paid for it. What an incredible app, but alas it is no more.
This fate has met many, many, other, similar apps.
Why good projects die
Why did the other tools die, but Beekeeper Studio has soldiered on? The simple answer is money and time.
By money I mostly mean time, but you know, time is money (cue eye rolls). So the answer is time and more time or money and more money, however you want to look at it.
Building software is hard. Building good software is harder. It’s also slow. It takes a lot of time and effort, even with an LLM to help. Like really - a LOT of time. I cannot overstate how much time it requires. Did I meantion it takes a lot of time?
It’s simply not possible to sustain a popular and active open source project by yourself, on evenings and weekends with no funding for years upon years. Even managing issues and pull requests is a full time job.
Approaches to Open Source Sustainability
There are several ways to make an open source project sustainable. Large linchpin projects like Vue.js are visible enough to be sustained by donations. Other large projects like React are funded entirely by a corporate sponsor who pays the developers directly.
On the commercial side, large infrastructure software like Kafka and Trino dominate as ‘open source core’ projects; where the central part of the system is open, but they sell a whole load of extras to make it useful to enterprises. Doing this path usually requires raising a lot of money and shooting for the moon to become a unicorn startup. Unfortunately this approach only works if your project has already succeeded in becoming an industry standard and adopted wholesale by millions of developers first.
Kafka was funded and maintained by an internal LinkedIn team for years before breaking off and becoming it’s own business.
This approach can also work for component libraries like AG-Grid, albeit at a smaller scale. Even then it requires the library to become somewhat of a standard.
Smaller apps like Beekeeper Studio have fewer choices. Our donation revenue maxxed out at $30/month, despite crossing a million downloads. We’re also not an ‘industry standard’ anything, we’re an app used by people, not a server deployed event processing engine.
Our model is to sell software that people want
Selling something that is useful and people are willing to pay for is a simple revenue model, and it’s the model we’ve embraced for Beekeeper Studio.
I think this provides the cleanest and simplest way of sustaining the project while also staying user-centric - selling extra features for those who are willing to pay for them.
That said, it’s impossible to ignore the irony that the best way to keep our app free and open is to lock some parts down and charge money for them. It is genuinely a hard balance. On the one hand we need to not short change the open source community, while also making the paid version good enough to pay the bills.
It’s slow too (did I mention that making good software takes a lot of time?), we launched our first paid features in 2022, yet I wasn’t able to go full time on the project until 2026, a full 4 years later.
Thankfully this approach is not without prescedent, excellent open source software like Sidekiq from Mike Perham uses this model to great success without alienating the community.
We keep it real
So far our approach is working. We’re a profitable business, but we’re also still an open source community project that attracts real community engagement and contributions. We even make our commercial features source available, even if they’re not fully open source.
We’re sincere about keeping Beekeeper Studio as open and accessible as possible. For example, we try to routinely turn paid features into free features, we never take away free features once launched, and we make all community contributed features free and open, even when we’d rather charge for them.
The best of the bunch
I think our approach to project sustainability is the right balance for us, and gives us some super powers like having an unreasonably powerful community edition.
We’re here for the long term. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy using our software as much as we enjoy making it.
