Open-source can change your life (financially 💰)

Wicked — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 11:33:47 +0000

TL;DR
Created Postiz - an open-source social media tool that makes $5k monthly.

Stress 😖

In August of 2024, I was under a lot of stress.
I worked with a few customers and felt they could finish their contracts at any moment. And I was right, I lost most of their revenue by March 2025.
I would find myself without any income.
It got even more stressful after figuring out that my wife is pregnant.

Building ⚒

I was already a developer for 10 years, and built (and earned) money before online from digital products. So, I decided to build a new product in the most public form possible: open-source.

I started building Postiz, an open-source social media scheduling tool with some cool AI features (currently 22k stars).

There is a notion that if something exists, you better not build it. However, the opposite is true - there are thousands of social media scheduling tools available, but because I built it open-source, I managed to differentiate myself from the competition.

I posted my first post on Reddit's /r/selfhosted, and it went viral - in fact, every post I put up after it also went viral.

I knew I had something in my hand, so I kept building.
And today, Postiz is earning more than $ 5,000 per month - enough to live, save, and lead a comfortable life, and actually work less.

All good, but it didn't start like that 👎🏻

When you start something new (especially when you work fast), it's clunky, it's not exactly what your customers want, and it's full of bugs.
Although it got 2 million Docker downloads and was well-received by the open-source community, nobody actually paid for it.

The fame and glory were nice, but it needed to make some money.
So, I continued building, releasing news of the new features, and conducting some marketing.

Successful Product Hunt launch (1st of the day)
Posted in every possible directory like Betalist, Theresanaiforthat, Openalternative, and many others.
Wrote constantly on X and LinkedIn
Started to do SEO (currently get 20k views per month)
Posted on DEV, Indiehackers, and Reddit.

Technical Debt 🤖

It was nice being the first open-source tool, but it was buggy, and the actual model of creating a post was extremely clunky and didn't work well.

Open-source people didn't mind, but customers couldn't stand it. So I went into monk mode and remade it in two days.

Believe me, it was a hard decision and so much work. But it paid off.

New trends 📈

So, I started with a very general approach, just a scheduling tool - but over time, I began to notice some trends and followed up on them.

For example, Postiz is very much open-source, so automation devs would probably feel more connected to it than other solutions.

Then, more and more videos started to appear on YouTube showing the Postiz workflow with n8n.

In two days, I created a custom N8N node and an SDK package.

And again, I got out of the competition for a social media scheduler.

Final Thoughts 🤔

Everybody can build something online and make money.
But don't fall into the easy trap.
It's very hard, you might need to invest money in

Design
Marketing

I wouldn't recommend that somebody go all in without having a job first. It's not good to work under stress.

And if you like this article, please help me out by giving me a star on Postiz? ❤️

https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app