s_severus

Author here. We chose to offer a dual commercial license for this case, which is not GPL and carries none of the obligations regarding sharing source code.

Of course the tradeoff is that it is not free (as in beer), but if your startup is getting sold then hopefully you got enough value out of our software to pay for a commercial license.

Thanks for sharing this. I'm in quite a similar situation with my own OSS project - it is about 5 years old now, and was started to scratch my own itch. It has naturally gained significant traction - fortune 500s building on it, startups basing their platform on it, etc. and last year I founded a company around it, and we've been making some income selling enterprise support and some paid plugins.

My co-founder and I also faced a similar decision to what David describes in the earlier post about seed funding: From the start I was very much into the indie hacker mindset, but we came to recognize that there's an opportunity to make a significant impact beyond my initial ambitions, and so we are currently navigating the process of raising a seed round.

I'm the co-founder of a headless commerce backend framework (Vendure) and I've known of the Vue Storefront project for quite a while now.

Headless commerce (i.e. API-driven, decoupled front-end) is maximally flexible but comes with the tradeoff that you suddenly have to build an entire storefront from scratch. Compared to off-the-shelf solutions like Shopify, which give you a fully integrated storefront with nice themes, it can be a high barrier for businesses which lack significant funding or developer resources.

Previous attempts to solve the front-end part of the headless commerce problem have had mixed results I think. One the one hand is fully-built, backend-agnostic storefronts like Vercel's Next.js Commerce or prior Vue Storefront products. On the other hand is just build from scratch exactly to your needs.

The complexity that comes with maintaining a backend-agnostic, full-featured storefront is huge. I think this release is a good middle ground that reminds me of the amazing Tailwind UI project - design primitives and larger components you can basically copy-paste into your own storefront app. It's probably the right way to go, as it saves a bunch of time but still leaves you free to build the storefront exactly as you want it.

With recent developments in LLM tech I can imagine a future where open-source, self-built solutions suddenly become way more accessible to more companies, as a single developer is able to use libraries like this and have AI stitch the parts together into a full storefront.

Small note on the part about the price range UI controls: the author criticizes Amazon for using min, max number inputs rather than a slider control.

2 arguments against a slider:

1. Potentially it is much harder to make an accessible slider control. 2. Sliders break down when you have a distribution skewed away from normal. For instance, if 90% of results are in the range $0-$50, but then a few results are over $1000, how do you calibrate the slider? A naïve approach would render it almost unusable if you want to limit to products between $20 - $30. Otherwise you need some sort of logarithmic scale. I've not seen examples of this being done well.

Hi James, congratulations on the launch!

The website looks great, your pitch is compelling and the vision is very similar to what I've been doing with vendure.io, which takes the same approach but towards ecommerce rather than CMS. Namely: open-source, headless, Node/TypeScript, dev- and code-first.

In our experience, your thesis is correct in that there certainly is a niche for a great, dev-first, self hosted version of what is otherwise seemingly already handled by SaaS products. We see users moving to Vendure from closed SaaS commerce platforms for reasons like: full control over the code & data, integration requirements, need to support unique requirements, wanting to build their own platform etc.

Furthermore our business model is similar - MIT core and paid enterprise plugins, and exploring cloud. Notably enterprise support and SLAs is also becoming a major area for us.

So it's great to see a kindred product getting some attention here on HN!

If you are interested to swap insights or discuss potential collaboration (many of our users are looking for a good CMS...) feel free to drop me a message at m.bromley at vendure.io :)

I'd like to +1 for Northflank. I've been using it for a few months for smaller projects and experiments, and the dashboard and overall experience has been great. Free tier is good enough to run small apps, and pricing is very competitive. Also got a lot of rapid email support from the Northflank staff when I ran into issues.

Hi! Great work so far. Does the team have a vision for a way to standardize the front-end part of shopify apps? That seems to be the really tricky part of a appstore-based platform going headless.

Simple - the load on their origin servers is cut down significantly. And GraphCDN made it easy and painless to set up. I don't know of any other options that can do schema-aware caching in this way that is as user-friendly as Stellate.

As an aside - I notice you commenting cynically to almost every thread here. A dose of skepticism is fine and of course we should consider alternatives and technical limitations etc. But your tone and activity comes across more of having a personal vendetta against this company. Very strange.

I work on a GraphQL-based e-commerce framework and several of my users have had good experiences integrating GraphCDN/Stellate into their projects.

Recently I started working with it too and so far the product has been great to work with. Moreover their team is very responsive. I had a technical question regarding my integration and one I was able to schedule a call for the next day with one of their team and to my surprise he'd prepared a script to solve the exact issue I was asking about (thanks Jovi)!

Congrats to the team!