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Ask HN: If your project is free, what are you building and why keep it free?

2•LeanVibe•1h ago
I'm curious about projects that are launched and run for free.

What are you building? How much does it cost you to operate? How long do you plan to keep it free?

Do you have a monetization plan later, or is the goal something else (learning, community, portfolio, etc.)?

Would love to hear about your projects and how you think about sustainability.

Comments

colesantiago•1h ago
Monetization means enshittification.
LeanVibe•1h ago
That's so true. Can you tell me about your project?
vunderba•54m ago
Everything I build is free (no ads, no premium subscriptions). A lot of what I create is educational, so if it helps people, that's reward enough.

To keep costs down, I manage my own VPS and limit myself to projects that can run 100% client-side (e.g. no reliance on third-party APIs).

LeanVibe•11m ago
Mee too. You're doing right thing
chistev•11m ago
No reliance on third-party APIs means your apps are severely limited, no?
didgetmaster•1m ago
I have a project that has been in 'perpetual beta' for years so it is a free download (25 MB zip file).

It runs completely on the user's computer so there is no service to maintain.

It is a new kind of data management system that was originally an object store to replace conventional file systems; but the tagging features I designed made it useful for creating, querying, and analyzing relational tables.

It is a hobby, so I like seeing how much faster I can perform operations than regular RDBMSs. It is extremely flexible, so lately I have been testing it out using large data sets. Creating tables with 100,000 columns or doing a pivot table in a 227M row table is fun for me.

See my profile for links.

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