by Kalpeshbhalekar on 7/29/23, 8:26 PM with 0 comments
Vedant, Kalpesh, and Akhil here - the Co-Founders at Scoutflo.
Vedant and I have been in the B2B SaaS Sales background for a combined of 12 years. We've worked with Browserstack, ZoomInfo and other SMEs and startups. Akhil has been a Software Engineer for over 5 years – specializing in SRE/DevOps at Zeta.
We’ve built a marketplace exclusively for commercial open source (COSS) products.
What is COSS? [1]
COSS or commercial open source is the best of both worlds – combining the benefits of open source and commercial business models.
Adopting a commercial model on top of the open source layer helps COSS companies generate revenue to sustain the development; while serving the needs of, and offering reliable support to paying customers.
The general principles of open source help with benefits like transparency, community contribution, higher customizability, no vendor lock-ins, and cost-effectiveness. [2]
Some examples of COSS products are OpenBB (Bloomberg alternative), Cal.com (Calendly alternative) and Medusa (Shopify alternative).
“The next wave of SaaS is COSS”
Scoutflo Atlas lists 220+ competent COSS products.
You can search for open source alternatives to proprietary products via category or keywords.
You can also compare up to 3 products based on metrics such as:
- Hosting and Pricing - Tech stack - Community strength
There’s an option to switch to ‘Scoutflo’s Choice’ - where you get to try out a Sandbox (free trial) version, and easily self-host a product.
currently applicable for selected products (Beta)
*The Why behind Scoutflo*
While working on another problem statement, we came across 2 open source products Papercups.io and Chatwoot (both YC-backed).
More research and conversations led us to MANY well-built, good quality open source products that clearly lacked the visibility or reach as that of their proprietary counterparts.
[Scoutflo’s origin story: https://scoutflo.com/origin-story]
Our B2B Sales background and experience helped us identify the problems and loopholes in the customer lifecycle.
Scoutflo Atlas is built to help with the awareness and distribution of open source products; while making it easier for their potential customers (businesses) to discover and evaluate them.
Increasing awareness and simplifying evaluation are the first logical steps to address this problem statement.
The immediate (or eventual) next problems are testing, onboarding, and maintaining these products on your preferred Cloud infrastructure – and we’re actively working on productized, scalable solutions for them.
TL; DR
The What: A marketplace platform for commercial open source (COSS) products.
The Who: COSS companies and businesses.
The Why: Help businesses find high-quality and reliable open source products, and help COSS companies with discovery and distribution.
The How: Scoutflo Atlas - To amplify vetted, high-quality open source products (Live - Show HN)
Scoutflo Sandbox - To get a quick, free trial (Beta version)
Scoutflo Deploy - To simplify adoption, self-hosting, and maintenance (Waitlist Live)
Happy to address any and all related questions, and receive some feedback from the HN community! :)
Notes:
[1] More about what is COSS and where it’s headed (our blog) <https://medium.com/scoutflo/whats-the-open-source-hype-all-a...>
[2] From Community to Commercialization by Peter Levine and Jennifer Li <https://a16z.com/2019/10/04/open-source-from-community-to-co...>