Developer tools & open source

About eight episodes touch developer products. The API businesses are the clearest money-makers: Adrian Horning’s Scrape Creators sells credit packs for social-media scraping (20 million requests a month), Miquel Palet’s Late wraps social platform APIs into one (just over 40K MRR, per-account pricing), and Dmytro Krasun’s ScreenshotOne reached about $12K MRR by focusing on APIs, his ‘super skill’ as a backend developer. Adrian notes an API doesn’t need many customers to reach decent MRR. Jonathan Fishner (ChartDB) gives the most structured advice — a five-step playbook: be the user, design for the persona’s constraints (self-hosted, no sign-up), start with a wedge, let usage reveal what to charge for, and market where developers already are. The persona tension is explicit: Nevo (Postiz) says developers are not a buying persona and should be treated as a free tier that builds brand, and Jonathan and Gus agree that the money comes from the teams developers bring in — whereas API founders charge developers directly. Marc Lou adds that repeated set-up work across projects can itself become a sellable developer product. Evidence is modest and largely from solo founders; figures are self-reported.

Key points

• Usage-priced APIs that handle painful infrastructure can earn well from relatively few customers — 3 episodes. (Adrian Horning · Adrian Horning (Oct 2025) ▶ 09:24) (Miquel Palet · Miquel Palet (Mar 2026) ▶ 01:36) (Dmytro Krasun · Dmytro Krasun (Nov 2024) ▶ 01:45)
• Developers rarely pay themselves; monetise the teams and companies they bring in — 2 episodes. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 07:13) (presenter · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 14:31) (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 07:01)
• Build in a space you know as a developer: be the user and use your own technical ‘super skill’ — 2 episodes. (presenter · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 13:24) (Dmytro Krasun · Dmytro Krasun (Nov 2024) ▶ 02:36) (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 07:01)
• Remove friction — no sign-up wall, no credentials, try it locally — because that’s how developers adopt tools — 1 episode. (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 07:49) (presenter · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 14:07)
• Turn the set-up work you repeat across projects into a product — 1 episode. (Marc Lou · Marc Lou (Aug 2024) ▶ 15:40)

Where guests disagree

Will developers pay for tools? ⚠️

• No — developers are not a buying persona; give them the tool free and charge the teams or enterprises behind them (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 07:13) (presenter · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 14:31)
• Yes, for APIs that save infrastructure pain — credit packs or per-account plans sold straight to developers (Adrian Horning · Adrian Horning (Oct 2025) ▶ 09:24) (Miquel Palet · Miquel Palet (Mar 2026) ▶ 01:36) (Dmytro Krasun · Dmytro Krasun (Nov 2024) ▶ 01:45)

Frameworks

• Developer-tool playbook (five steps) — Jonathan’s steps for starting a developer tool from idea to business. (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 07:01)
  • 1. Be the user / build for yourself
  • 2. Design for the persona’s constraint, not the ideal (developers: self-hosted, no sign-up, no credentials)
  • 3. Start with a wedge, not the full vision; iterate in small steps
  • 4. Let usage lead monetisation (e.g. team real-time collaboration)
  • 5. Market where the ICP lives (GitHub, Hacker News, self-hosted subreddits)

Tactics

• Remove sign-up and credential friction for developers — No sign-up wall, no sales calls and no database credentials: users run a query locally and paste the JSON. (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 07:49)
• Turn your repeated set-up work into a product — After 10-15 products he built a reusable code base (landing page, deploy, payment button, emails, accounts) in under a week and put a price tag on it for other developers. (Marc Lou · Marc Lou (Aug 2024) ▶ 15:40)
• Distribute through developer communities — Post where developers already are: GitHub, Hacker News, self-hosted subreddits, and let teams share internally. (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 09:04)

Stories & examples

• Spotting the gap for Late: While building SaaS products, Miquel found existing social media automation APIs too expensive, too complicated or poorly documented, and built a developer-friendly API-first platform. Lesson: Gaps in developer tooling often come down to price, simplicity and documentation. (Miquel Palet · Miquel Palet (Mar 2026) ▶ 03:14)
• It scrapes public social-media data (Instagram, YouTube, Twitter) and ad libraries (Facebook, LinkedIn), handling infrastructure and proxy rotation, for customers like link-in-bio and short-form analytics tools. Credit packs are $10 for 5,000, $50 for 25,000 and $500 for 500,000. It wins by being reliable and by Adrian being easy to reach. (Adrian Horning · Adrian Horning (Oct 2025) ▶ 09:24)
• They first built an AI database client, but adoption stalled because it needed credentials, database access and local installs from engineers who didn’t yet trust them. They pivoted to ChartDB, which turns a database into a diagram; it worked because it is visual with an instant ‘wow’ and removes friction (no access, no install). (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 02:55)
• A simple UI mirroring the API: create posts across accounts, connect accounts, manage API keys, a unified inbox for DMs and comments, webhooks, publishing logs and API docs, which get the most attention. (Miquel Palet · Miquel Palet (Mar 2026) ▶ 13:41)
• You run ChartDB’s ‘smart query’ in your own database client, paste the resulting JSON into ChartDB and import it to see the whole schema with table relationships, then iterate and see differences against the live database. (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 10:07)

Numbers

• API requests per month: 20000000 requests/month (self-reported, approx.) (Adrian Horning · Adrian Horning (Oct 2025) ▶ 01:35)
• Screenshots rendered (period not stated): 2000000 screenshots (self-reported, approx.) (Dmytro Krasun · Dmytro Krasun (Nov 2024) ▶ 10:52)
• Late wraps the official social platform APIs into a single API, paying for the top platform plans so users get all features. Pricing is per connected account across three plans (Build, Accelerate, Unlimited). It has just crossed 40K MR, 50K sign-ups since launch, 700+ paying users and churn under 10%. (Miquel Palet · Miquel Palet (Mar 2026) ▶ 01:36)

Caveats & warnings

• The API scrapes only public data (said ‘for the lawyers out there’). (Adrian Horning · Adrian Horning (Oct 2025) ▶ 09:10)
• Gus questions why people pay for free open-source tools; the answer is developers are the entry point to paying teams. (presenter · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 14:31)

Also covered here: Open-source SaaS

Only three episodes treat open source in depth — Papermark (Marc and Iuliia, an open-source DocSend successor near $1M ARR), Postiz (Nevo, a social scheduler at 17K MRR in the episode) and ChartDB (Jonathan Fishner, about 9K MRR) — plus a passing tactic from Pontus Abrahamsson. They tell a consistent story. Open code is a distribution channel: developers find the project on GitHub, Hacker News and r/selfhosted, try it without a sign-up wall, and spread it; Nevo says to treat the repository as your landing page and to concentrate a launch into one week to hit GitHub trending. Money comes not from developers but from the teams and companies they bring in, via hosted plans and enterprise self-hosting. Marc lists four benefits — defensibility (nobody can undercut free), zero-friction adoption, community R&D velocity and auditability for buyers such as banks — and Nevo argues that when anyone can build anything, brand rather than code is the moat, citing copycat forks abandoned within weeks. Caveats are candid: being ‘an open-source alternative’ is not enough, excitement must be converted into paying customers, contributors don’t necessarily raise productivity, and enterprise support suits funded or sales-minded teams. Pat Walls frames open source as a distribution angle in crowded categories.

Key points

• Open-core model: free self-hostable core, paid hosted cloud, enterprise licences or support — 3 episodes. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 04:29) (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 01:56) (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 09:12)
• Open source is a distribution and brand channel in crowded categories — GitHub, Hacker News and self-hosted communities — 3 episodes. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 03:55) (presenter · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 22:15) (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 09:04) +1 more
• Community contributions speed development and cut maintenance — if you make contributing easy — 3 episodes. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 06:06) (Iuliia · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 13:32) (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 11:26) +1 more
• Developers are the free entry point, not the buyer; monetise the teams they bring — 2 episodes. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 07:13) (presenter · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 14:31) (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 08:39)
• Free code is defensible: nobody undercuts free, and the original keeps the brand when copied — 2 episodes. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 05:12) (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 09:26)
• Open code builds trust with security-conscious buyers who can audit it — 1 episode. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 06:18)

Where guests agree

• The money in open source comes from hosting and enterprise, not from individual developers (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 04:40) (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 09:12) (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 01:56)

Frameworks

• Four benefits of building open source — Marc’s list of why open source works as a business model. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 05:08)
  • Defensible: core already free, nothing to undercut
  • Scalable: zero barrier to entry; self-hosters convert to hosted
  • Community-driven R&D velocity
  • Security and trust: code auditable by third parties
• Open-core business model — How Papermark monetises free open-source software. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 04:29)
  • Free self-hosted core
  • Paid hosted version for non-technical users
  • Enterprise licence for advanced features, still self-hosted
• Nevo’s open-source launch playbook — Five steps run in the same week to get a repository onto the GitHub trending feed, after which stars, Discord members, issues and pull requests accelerate. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 10:40)
  • Step 1 - prepare the repo: README as landing page (or ‘open-source alternative to X’), licence (MIT, Apache 2, AGPL3), starter issues, Discord server, deployment docs, Docker
  • Step 2 - bring traffic: register Hacker News and Reddit accounts in advance (build karma), Lemmy; write articles on Dev.to, Medium, HackerNoon with strong titles and cover images for Google Discover
  • Step 3 - Show HN post linking to the GitHub repo
  • Step 4 - post on r/selfhosted (and cross-post), humble, first person, ask for a star, repeat each release
  • Step 5 - push your own channels (X, LinkedIn, newsletter) to the GitHub repo

Tactics

• Submit a Show HN linking to the GitHub repo — Post ‘Show HN’ plus the project name, linking the repository rather than the website; reaching the main feed can bring about 10,000 views. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 14:11)
• Post each release on r/selfhosted — Self-promotion of open-source projects is welcome there; list the features, ask for a star, be humble, use ‘I’ not ‘we’, post monthly and cross-post to relevant subreddits. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 15:09)
• Position as an open-source alternative to a known product — If an alternative already exists, say in the README that you are an open-source alternative to it, which gives people the fastest context. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 11:09)
• Create GitHub issues for features you want contributors to build — New developers don’t know what to work on; ready-made issues let them ask to be assigned, so you get code faster. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 11:26)
• Make deployment easy with docs and Docker — Without deployment docs developers churn and won’t clone; a Docker image makes deployment much easier. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 12:02)
• Take part in Hacktoberfest — Join the month-long open-source hackathon to attract contributors and visibility. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 09:43)
• Distribute through developer communities — Post where developers already are: GitHub, Hacker News, self-hosted subreddits, and let teams share internally. (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 09:04)
• Concentrate all launch traffic (articles, Show HN, Reddit, own channels) into one week to reach GitHub trending. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 12:24)

Stories & examples

• Copycats abandon their clones: People copied Postiz and self-hosted it as a competing product; it stressed him, but a week or two later they had abandoned the projects. Lesson: The original creator of an open-source project keeps the brand; copiers stay a step behind. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 09:32)
• Notification infrastructure start-up to 32,000 stars: He joined an open-source notification infrastructure company he met in a co-working space; in two years it went from zero to 32,000 GitHub stars. Lesson: Seeing that growth convinced him of open source as a growth channel. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 04:25)
• Banks auditing open-source code: Instead of granting access to proprietary software, a bank evaluating Papermark can audit the open-source code itself. Lesson: Open code shortcuts enterprise security reviews. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 06:18)
• Learning to build via open source: Iuliia could not code, built her first project on top of existing open source, open-sourced it and got support from the community. Lesson: Open source communities help non-coders ship. (Iuliia · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 12:59)

Numbers

• GitHub stars: 21000 stars (self-reported) (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 02:10)
• Developers using the product during the year: 250000 developers / year (self-reported) (Jonathan Fishner · Jonathan Fishner (Feb 2026) ▶ 02:17)
• 20,000 MRR after the first year and 75,000 MRR by mid second year; around 30,000 users (many free), roughly a thousand customers (captioned ‘,000’), 60 contributors, 7,000 GitHub stars and 800,000 views on shared documents, their north-star metric. (Iuliia · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 10:08)
• Contributors and GitHub stars: 60 contributors; 7,000 stars count (self-reported) (Iuliia · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 10:30)
• A SaaS with four tiers (standard, team, pro, ultimate) differentiated by channels and features; 17K MRR, 472 subscribers, 19% churn, 3,830 trials since August 2025 and 21% trial conversion. The open-source version is identical to the cloud offering but self-hosters must do the provider set-up themselves. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 02:56)
• App downloads attributed to open source: 5000000 downloads (self-reported) (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 00:26)

Caveats & warnings

• Being an open-source alternative is not a surefire success; you must reach feature parity and out-ship incumbents. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 12:26)
• Open-source excitement only matters if converted into paying customers. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 12:51)
• Check whether an open-source alternative makes sense and the market has room before building. (Marc · Marc & Iuliia (Aug 2025) ▶ 08:51)
• Contributors don’t necessarily make you more productive, though they bring feedback and faster bug-finding. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 08:05)
• Enterprise self-hosting support is where the money usually is, but mostly for funded companies or those motivated to do enterprise sales. (Nevo · Nevo (Jan 2026) ▶ 09:20)

How much to trust this

• Evidence: 10 episodes, 11 independent speakers (repeat guests counted once; Pat and Gus counted as one voice).