8 Profitable Open Source Library Success Stories [2023]

Hello! My name is John Leider and I am the founder of Vuetify, LLC.I started my company to help developers, especially design inept and inexperienced ones, build beautiful web applications.

Vuetify puts a large emphasis on its free aspect. Locking extra features or functionality behind a paywall just feels bad. Open Source is about sharing and improving code through community support. Over the years, this philosophy has allowed me to grow a massive user-base and ecosystem surrounding the framework.

Hi! My name is Oleksii Avramenko. I’m one of the founders of EspoCRM, an open-source CRM application that helps to grow businesses.

The first version of EspoCRM was launched in 2014 and October of 2020 has seen the release of the 6th one. During the last year (29 Nov 2019 - 29 Nov 2020), the average number of downloads has increased to more than 16,000/year and we are extremely proud of it as it means that our product is in demand for our clients. Over the years, we started to make on average up to $30k a month.

Hello! I’m Marko Saric and I’m the co-founder of Plausible Analytics. Plausible Analytics is a simple, open-source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

At the time of writing (September 1st), we are at $4,557 MRR and 743 paying subscribers. We’ve grown a lot over the last few months considering that we announced $415 MRR at the start of April this year (about a year after we launched our paid subscriptions).

I’m Adrian, the co-founder of HollaEx, an open-source crypto software startup. As a founder with a design background, my primary focus was on the product design of HollaEx, which allows anyone to start an exchange with their own coins and crypto prices.

HollaEx in 2021 has evolved into a general-purpose crypto service, with a focus on exchange technology and tackles key crypto infrastructure solutions like wallet tech, exchange hosting, and white-label services.

My name is Dmitry Barashev and I am the guy who is working on GanttProject, a popular free open-source project scheduling application for desktop operating systems. GanttProject may be thought of as a replacement for Microsoft Project for those who can’t afford to spend $1000 on a Gantt chart drawing software. It is used by small and medium-sized businesses in construction, mechanical engineering, media production, and other industries, as well as at colleges on project management classes.

GanttProject is free for any purpose, however, there is an option to pay-what-you-want and, to my big surprise, quite a few people choose this option. This, along with a few ad banners, generates about $3000-5000 monthly. Quite far from the Forbes list, but not bad for a pet project.

During the dot com boom of the late 1990s, Jimmy Wales was running an internet search company. That's when he began to experiment with the idea of an online encyclopedia. In 2001, Wales launched Wikipedia, a website where thousands of community members could contribute, edit, and monitor content on just about anything. Today, the non-profit has stayed true to its open-source roots and is the fifth most visited website in the world. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," how Florence Wetterwald created Blabla dolls – eco-friendly knitted dolls made in Peru.

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