I did it! My open-source company now makes $14.2k monthly as a single developer

#webdev #programming #ai #productivity

In September 2024, I started Postiz (star it if you can 🙏🏻):
https://github.com/gitroomhq/postiz-app

A social media scheduling tool built in open-source.
It's funny that a market that has existed for 20 years doesn't have a good open-source solution.

I had a few principles in mind as a non-funded company that doesn't need money (or maximize revenue at all costs)

Everything (but I mean everything) must be open-sourced.
Charge only for cloud costs, never force developers to pay.

Today, Postiz earns $14,000 per month from subscriptions, and I aim to reach $20,000 in two months.

Here are the step-by-step instructions I took to get to where I am today.

1. List it everywhere

Open source has special powers, there are tons of GitHub repositories and websites where you can list your solution (Awesome OSS alternatives, Awesome Self-hosted, etc.) And also websites like Open Alternative

This is very powerful because people actually check those websites, and they also bring a powerful backlink. I will talk about it in the next part.

2. Launch it everywhere

If you are active on DEV or Reddit /r/selfhosted you would see my posts. I didn't make "big versions" for Postiz. Every minor feature was a version. That allowed me to talk about Postiz more and mention it repeatedly.

This is another great thing about open source: so many Reddit channels and DEV websites are for devs. And Postiz is not a dev tool, but I built it as open source, which makes it dev-related.

3. Listen to the DEV community

My first post on Reddit, people asked to have a Docker (because it's a complicated mono-repo), and that's the first thing I did. I am proud to say that today, Postiz has reached 4.79M Docker downloads.

4. Market as much as coding or more

There are so many good software pieces that nobody knows about because word of mouth takes time. When you first launch your product, it will be buggy, unfriendly, and hard to use.

This is why you constantly need to work on it and market it. I have seen so many good products fail or not reach their goals because of their marketing.

I don't have a strong social presence on traditional platforms, so I posted the product mostly on Reddit / DEV / LinkedIn and a little bit on X.

But I knew that social media is a "push" marketing, which means that somebody sees something they didn't look for; the algorithm exposes it to them.

The best way to find you is by researching what you need. This is why SEO and AISEO (ChatGPT) are more important, because people who buy from research stay with you for a longer time.

5. Find new audiences

In July 2025, I was making $6,523 monthly, and in August 2024, I was already making $12,648 monthly, almost doubling the revenue in one month.

I started seeing a lot of people using social media automation tools like n8n and tons of YouTube videos.

It makes sense because n8n users are developers willing to pay, and they would choose an open-source solution. So I changed my focus. I published an official n8n node, improved the public API, and focused heavily on automation.

I started to cold outreach Skool communities and have them promote Postiz.

My affiliate marketing started to explode, and tons of people began publishing Postiz organically.

The coolest part is that people who automate Postiz with n8n templates and use automated software don't need to manually add posts, which increases the number of months they pay for Postiz.

6. Focus on SEO

Once you start to get more and more backlinks to your website, your authority increases, and more people find you on search engines.

Also, more people send you cold emails to exchange links with them (you need to pick a good one), but you grow even more.

This is super important because with SEO (like ads), there is an endless scale. It works for you even when you don't work.

Burnout

Two months ago, my wife and I brought a beautiful baby daughter. After one full year of working 200%, I experienced massive burnout (until today). I don't yet know how to get out of it, and I am glad the community can help each other.

But I am happy with everything that I have achieved, and everybody can do the same if they spend a little time.

The most important thing is not to stop. Growth takes time. It took me a very long time to make a decent amount of revenue from the product.

Good luck to all of you out there!