I built LetItDo, a voice agent for Android that finishes real tasks. WhatsApp messages, Spotify, grocery orders, the boring 47-tap routines.
Every other day someone asks: are you going to open source it?
The honest answer is no.
Open source is not free distribution
The most common reason indie devs open source: "I will get more users by going open source." It is rarely true.
Open source attracts contributors and users who want a free tool. It does not magically attract people who pay. Linear, Notion, Superhuman, Cal.com all started closed. Cal.com later open sourced AFTER it had paying customers, as a marketing move with infrastructure already in place.
If your product has zero distribution, open sourcing it gives you zero contributors and zero users with extra steps.
Open source kills monetization optionality
The moment LetItDo is on GitHub:
- Someone wraps it, hosts it, and charges for it
- Customers who would have paid me $5/month build their own from source
- Acquirers stop being interested
The "AI makes everything copyable" argument
People say: with Claude Code, anyone builds LetItDo in a week. Half right. AI compresses build time, does not eliminate moat.
The remaining moats:
- Distribution and brand
- Specific UX choices
- The skill capture loop (data, not code)
- OEM-specific quirks (Vivo, Xiaomi, Samsung battery savers)
Open sourcing compresses competitor copy time from weeks to days. For an unvalidated product, worst possible time to give it away.
The general rule
Open source AFTER you have a profitable product, AS marketing. Not BEFORE you have users, AS distribution. The latter never works the way founders hope.
If you are an indie dev about to MIT-license a product you spent 60 hours on, ask: do I want to build a business or build a side project?
Try LetItDo
Demo: https://x.com/22Gstudios/status/2051377769414791582
Early access: https://tally.so/r/jaGvx9
If you have shipped indie products and made the open source decision differently, I want to hear why.
Top comments (0)