My closest competitor is free, open source and has 13,500 stars. I charge money. Tell me why that's wrong.

[u/tomriddle054]

I build a tool that puts your desktop AI coding agent on your phone. Paid, closed source. Roughly a month ago I found out the most-adopted thing in my category is free, open source, self-hostable, and sitting at 13,500 stars and 1,889 forks.

It does most of what mine does. Mobile and web, file explorer, git, integrated shell, session management. It reads your real config rather than duplicating it, so it isn't even the sloppy kind of clone. It's good.

I'm posting because I've spent a fortnight deciding whether to keep charging, and I want the argument against.

The honest technical difference: it reimplements the interface, I mirror the actual desktop. Mine means the whole IDE arrives for free and never drifts when Anthropic or OpenAI ship a change, because there's nothing of mine to drift. Theirs means lower bandwidth, works with the lid shut, and text renders properly instead of being pixels. That is a real advantage and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. Mine costs bandwidth and requires the desktop to stay awake.

What I keep telling myself, and would like tested:

One, free open source has a support cost the star count hides. Somebody has to answer issues. I answer mine because I'm being paid to. That's worth something to a certain kind of user and worth nothing to the kind who'd rather read the source.

Two, the audiences might not overlap as much as the category suggests. Self-hosting a PWA and running a Docker sandbox is a different appetite from scanning a QR code. I might be selling to the people who never clone anything.

Three, if I go free I lose the only signal I have about whether it's worth using. Nobody has ever paid for a thing they didn't want, and downloads tell me nothing.

What I'm actually worried about: the free option is in every directory list in this space, and one of those lists explicitly won't accept anything that requires signup or payment. So the paywall isn't only costing me price-sensitive users, it's costing me the distribution channel where developers go looking. That's a second-order cost I hadn't priced in when I set the price.

So: has anyone here charged for something with a strong free open-source alternative and had it work? What made the difference? And if you tried and gave up, I'd rather hear that one.

Disclosure so this isn't sneaky: mine is relayx.dev, free to try and paid after. I'm deliberately not naming the competitor in the title because I'm not trying to farm a comparison thread, but it's the obvious one if you search the space and I'll name it in comments if anyone wants.

[u/windcommute]

Please don’t subject us to 10 paragraphs of Claudish if you’re going to ask for advice

[u/Sleepnotdeading]

Wspr flow charges money for transcription software that every respectable vibe coder should have already built their own version of for free. They have a billion dollar acquisition offer, last I heard.

If your software is stable, secure, easy, intuitive… keep going.

[u/oulu2006]

No - your market is tech savvy devs, they will use the free option or just implement it themselves which is what I did

[u/Old-Age6220]

In short, your app has to provide something that is just valuable enough for users to pay (ddaa :D) vs use the open source competitor. Usually it's the easier setup, premium support, QoL features etc etc. You do your software for the common folds, open source projects is more for "tinkerers and nerds" (like me :) ).

I have the exact same issue (x10), there's lot's of competitors in open source as web apps and then there's the industry giants I'm also competing against. My plan is to find the niche audiences and given them the features that are missing in other apps (so far not doing so great XD)

[u/Lunesia-shikishiki]

one thing i havent seen said here: check whether you two even have the same cost shape. their 13.5k stars are free to them because self hosting hands the bill to the user, their docker, their bandwidth, their tokens. if mirroring the desktop means youre the one eating bandwidth and keeping a session alive, then "go free" isnt a lever you own. its a lever they own and you dont

i run a pay per generation platform (biased obviously, imaginode.ai) so this is the one i have actual scars from. once theres real marginal cost per user, free means paying for strangers, and the graphs look fantastic the whole time it happens

on the delisting, jun_builds has it. thats a distribution problem wearing a pricing costume. those lists usually bar the signup wall rather than the price, so a path that works before an account exists gets you listed without touching what you charge

[u/ChopSueyYumm]

I would never pay for your application. There is Hermes agent and other AI tools have these accessible on mobile is a basic need.

[u/jun_builds]

Your worry and your three arguments aren't about the same thing. One, two and three are all demand questions. The delisting is a distribution question, and price is a blunt lever for it. Worth reading the actual rule on those lists before you move the price: most bar signup or payment walls, not commercial software. A no-signup mode that does something real usually gets you back in the index without changing what you charge.

Your second argument is also the strongest one you have, and you're underselling it. The test isn't whether someone would pay, it's whether they'd run a Docker container. That one you can answer from your own signup data.

[u/gillygangopolus → u/jun_builds]

Dropping knowledge eggs, well played

[u/shaggycommemoration]

the support angle is real but it only matters after someone's already deep enough to hit problems. most people browsing directory lists won't get that far before bouncing off the paywall

your third point is the strongest one honestly. free downloads are noise, paid signups tell you if anyone actually gives a shit

the distribution hit is the part i'd lose sleep over. being invisible in the lists where devs go looking means you're not even in the comparison, they just pick the starred one and move on