Ask HN: Need advice with open-sourcing SaaS business

2 points

9 years ago

I've created https://mljar.com - which is a platform for building machine learning models. I have >500 users, however only ~30 paid something. Users are paying for computational credits. For each user I launch c4.2xlarge instance to train models. Most of users are people that are learning/trying machine learning - they just use free credits and go.

I'm thinking about doing open-source from my platform. So, everyone can download and run it locally for free. The OSS version can be executed only on one machine and models/results will be stored on locally. The SaaS version (for subscribers) can be executed on multiple machines and I will provide machines and storage. The benefits from OSS version that I expect: more people will use MLJAR, I don't need to pay for free users, with more users I will have more feedback.

I hope to make MLJAR more popular with OSS. However, I still want to make money on it to develop it further. I would like to ask you for advice, what do you think about it?