I totally understand the fear when VC money comes on the table, but not every open source project can be in the Apache or Linux Foundation ;) Most of the money in those organizations also comes from the big names, not from indie hackers sponsoring for them. A lot of people think that open source means free because you don't have to pay for it, but that's wrong.
I think the future of an open source project and the company behind it really depends on the founders. If open source is really in their DNA, they will fight for it. If everything goes wrong, at least the open source code will remain. The closed code will most likely disappear with the company.
Thanks for your feedback! We really need people like you to point out when things are going in the wrong direction. It's often a difficult balance between making money and giving back to the community. So we need your outside perspective!
When did you try Tiptap? In the last few weeks we have made several improvements to our documentation, but you are right! At a certain point, if you want to do really custom things, you have to put Tiptap aside and dive deep into ProseMirror. The learning curve is pretty steep, and the documentation could use some more step-by-step information. You may have to give it a second try.
We are quite happy with the free tier. We may just make some small adjustments, but I think we'll stick with it!
Duckbook looks promising. I like the clean and neat design! I will share it with my colleagues.
I can take away your fear. The core of Tiptap will always be free and open source. We will do maintenance and improvement, but eventually we have to generate revenue to put Tiptap on a sustainable path. A few weeks ago, the work at our digital agency was funding Tiptap, and it has always been a challenge to balance these two branches.
We are trying to find a good balance between the open source part that a lot of people love and our paid services that give your project your advanced features.
We always think about our pricing model, as we literally do today! Feedback is always welcome to adjust the fine line between our open source and business parts.
It seems like you're heading in the right direction on packaging/pricing.
Charging for services you manage, more team members, and security features bigger cos care about all make sense to me.
I previously looked at your Pro extensions and some seemed nice to have (UniqueId, emoji), but it wasn't enough to get me to pay, and I rolled my own versions of those instead.
Building multiplayer sync is really tricky, so providing that as a managed service seems valuable and worth paying for. I have no problem paying for services like Clerk.com or Liveblocks.io that involve managed "servers" I don't want to build/run vs a purely client-side library.
I recently discovered Liveblocks, and think their positioning/marketing/docs are great -- the fastest way to turn any SaaS app multiplayer.
I wonder if you could do something similar but focused on all the complexities of text editing (esp since it's such a core primitive for LLMs now). Just a thought - excited to see where you take it!
Thank you for your feedback regarding our pricing!
We know that some individual Pro extensions don't justify the price of the whole tier. That's why we are thinking about selling individual extensions in the future. A lot of people build these types of extensions on their own, which is possible thanks to open source, and that's totally fine. In the last few weeks we have added more value to the paid tiers in the form of the advanced extensions TableofContents, Mathematics and the brand new Tiptap AI. We think it's worth it!
We feel the same about Managed Services. In addition to maintenance, support, development and so on, there are hardware resources that you have to pay for. We think that's fair.
I really like Liveblocks, the slick design, the impressive documentation and the detailed examples. We can learn a lot from them. As a technical decision maker I definitely wouldn't choose it because the backend source is closed source. The collaboration space is still new and there is no real standard in my opinion. The only (de-facto) standard can be an open source solution. In the end, at least the file format has to be interchangeable between a managed cloud and the open source core, regardless of the features around it. A few months ago I thought Yjs might become that standard, but it has too many rough edges. There are CRDTs popping up every month. We'll see.
Thanks for your feedback! Can we find your electron app somewhere or at least the source code? Desktop and especially mobile apps are a completely different domain for an editor.
As my colleague Sebastian mentioned here [1], we are still in the process of finding the right pricing model. Over the last few months we have added a lot of value to our plans with new extensions and the managed collaboration backend. We also added a free plan to use our services for small hobby projects or to build a prototype to evaluate the use of Tiptap. So we thought it was only fair to change the price. Right now we don't have the option to only pay for the services you need.
Which services do you use? Pro Extensions, Collaboration and/or AI? We are curious about the usage of our services.
The first link shows a discussion that started in July 2020, when Tiptap was only available in version 1. The new major version 2, which is a complete rewrite, was in development. The biggest drawback the GitLab engineers had was the lack of a test suite in Tiptap 1. That's understandable, because as a key component of your application, testing is necessary to ensure that you catch breakable changes. Tiptap 2 does just that. [1]
There is also a startup based in Stockholm called Tiptapp. As always, you just want to find a cool name for your side project, do a little research, don't find anything, and later there are projects with similar names that have been around for years.
I think the future of an open source project and the company behind it really depends on the founders. If open source is really in their DNA, they will fight for it. If everything goes wrong, at least the open source code will remain. The closed code will most likely disappear with the company.
Thanks for your feedback! We really need people like you to point out when things are going in the wrong direction. It's often a difficult balance between making money and giving back to the community. So we need your outside perspective!