This topic was started on FOSSBilling GitHub Discussions, and was moved to this forum on 19/03/2023. Original post authors and dates are preserved.

evrifaessa - May 20, 2022

Donations and sponsorships through Open Collective (now open: https://opencollective.com/fossbilling)
Maybe advertisements in our main website (there seems to be great alternatives to Google Adsense. Such as EthicalAds by Read The Docs. The money would go to our Open Collective account, and we'd make sure to go with something that won't track our users, or don't place advertisements at all.

FOSSBilling is a free project, and will likely be free as long as it exists. We'll need a valid economical sustainibility plan. Let's discus this here, transparently.

BelleNottelling - May 20, 2022

Potentially further down the line, paid / priority support could provide some further income.

The big thing imo is keeping the entire project open source and free. If someone doesn't want to pay for it, I still want them to have full functionality.

evrifaessa - May 20, 2022

The big thing imo is keeping the entire project open source and free. If someone doesn't want to pay for it, I still want them to have full functionality

Absolutely. That's why we removed Pro from BoxBilling in the first place and I personally wouldn't want to have that back in the future.

jaapmarcus - May 20, 2022

Maybe advertisements in our main website (there seems to be great alternatives to Google Adsense. Such as EthicalAds by Read The Docs. The money would go to our Open Collective account, and we'd make sure to go with something that won't track our users, or don't place advertisements at all.

For the low traffic not worth the time to setup...

gOOvER - May 20, 2022

Paid Support for Buisness Customers 😉 They earn Money with the software and when they need help, they should pay 🙂 Or priority support

jaapmarcus - May 20, 2022

Paid Support for Buisness Customers 😉 They earn Money with the software and when they need help, they should pay 🙂 Or priority support

Every user is an "Buisness Customers" as it has no use in non comercial use...

notbasetwo - May 20, 2022

I think that sponsorships is definitely the way to go, and certainly the most realistic! For people who would like a specific feature - having it be prioritised by someone throwing some money at it is always a bonus.

Paid support would probably be an option once the product is in a much cleaner shape than it is now - I think at the moment it would be too much to ask for given the state of the project.

Advertising on the site would likely not be worth a huge ton, perhaps if there was a good chunk of informative content (i.e. tutorials, etc) - that could drive traffic & ad revenue.

John-S4 - May 23, 2022

Agree with @notbasetwo and @jaapmarcus that on site advertising is really not worth the effort unless you have a significant amount of traffic and a number of quality content articles to bring people in to the site. It's also pretty bloody annoying to most users and a lot of people who would be visiting a software project site will already be using browsers with ad blockers enabled.

Paid support is a nice idea, but only on the provision that there are people ready to provide that support who can do so quickly and solve most issues. Unless you have a support team in place to provide that then it feels like cheating people to be offering it.

+1 for Open Collective though.

jaapmarcus - May 24, 2022

Last option is off course software as an service...

haydenwalker980 - May 26, 2022

+1 for Open Collective. Just need to find a fiscal host.

evrifaessa - May 26, 2022

Our colective is already open and operating, we're now under Open Source Collective.

https://opencollective.com/fossbilling

John-S4 - May 29, 2022

As well as Open Collective we also now have GitHub Sponsors set up and approved.

You can find the Sponsor button at the top of the organisation page and also at the top of each repo.

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

Here is my idea...

For integrating with panels and vps providers and other provisioning providers.....I think we should provide only 5 core modules for the major ones. Then make the rest a paid api with a unified api interface like this does it for shopping carts https://api2cart.com/ WHY? because there's no way unless we get huge amount of free team members with lots of time can we can keep making connectors or keep up with the whmcs plugin marketplace. Thoughts?

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

FYI the community is still free to make modules and release them or to make them paid.

Also some other ideas:
developer certification
certifying modules
bounties
feature crowd funding (like someone said)

jaapmarcus - Sep 30, 2022

Here is my idea...

For integrating with panels and vps providers and other provisioning providers.....I think we should provide only 5 core modules for the major ones. Then make the rest a paid api with a unified api interface like this does it for shopping carts https://api2cart.com/ WHY? because there's no way unless we get huge amount of free team members with lots of time can we can keep making connectors or keep up with the whmcs plugin marketplace. Thoughts?

Idea is to make Fossbilling "Core" without any server connectors and make them all as plugin optionally so the main product becomes smaller.

But every module that we want to produce should be free and building an paid api is for me a no go.

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

ok noted

John-S4 - Sep 30, 2022

100% agree with @jaapmarcus - A paid API would be explicitly against the ideals and principles of the project.

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

yes, makes sense, i think maybe then just paid open source plugins as you guys already are heading, in fact it might be better, then ech dev can make plugins as they like and earn individually

jaapmarcus - Sep 30, 2022

Paid opensource plugins can't exists

Unless they are paid before hand and then opensourced...

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

well yeah calling them open source is wrong, but they have their source open yet they are commercial and its done by copyright on the trademark i think, also wordpress does it with GPL

evrifaessa - Sep 30, 2022

the software itself is open-source. they provide paid hosting and management under their name but the software is still open-sourced.

jaapmarcus - Sep 30, 2022

Yes but Wordpress is available as opensource and they sell services under the "Wordpress" brand but the code is still free and open available.

securehosting1 - Mar 8, 2023

Obviously, the big money maker would be to remove the branding for $2pm etc or with support $10-$50 pm.

securehosting1 - Mar 16, 2023

It would be very easy to simply copy OSSN style https://opensource-scoialnetwork.org they have opensource free then a separate site that sells a premium version and premium paid plugins/components.