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 maintainer of Vendure. Today we released our major new version, which is a huge upgrade.
I work on Vendure full time. I've been building it for about 5 years now, and last year I got a co-founder, started a company, and so far we are bootstrapping on the open core model with some enterprise support contracts too.
I'm happy to answer any questions you have, and thanks for taking a look!
Edit: Not sure what happened with the link - I originally submitted our actual domain at http://vendure.io. Looks like some DNS config issue.
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.
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.
Not my project, though I'm a user of it and a big fan, is Typesense (https://github.com/typesense/typesense), an extremely fast and lightweight search engine.
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)!
The thing that rarely gets discussed re Bolt and Fast is what most merchants think about the idea of one click checkout from product detail pages. IMO there are misaligned incentives in many, many cases in that this flow would tend to reduce average order value.
I spent ~3 years building a product before launching on PH. It's a real product with an existing community of (at the time) around 1k on Slack and real companies using it. Got ~80 up votes and finished the day somewhere around position 10. I was moderately happy with it.
Around the same time, a known smooth-talking vaporware peddlar in the same industry launched on PH with literally a bare GH repo and a minimal landing page. I knew 100% that there was no actual usable product. The founder had recently been involved in a similar project that collapsed under huge promises. He got hundreds of upvotes and plenty of "awesome product, LFG man!!!" type comments.
As a teenager in the UK I bought an issue of a PC magazine that had a cover CD (remember?) with Borland C++ Builder. That's what got me started with programming.
A while later the same mag gave away a copy of Delphi. That really opened things up. I found it was more accessible and was quickly making all kinds of stupid windows forms apps and sharing them with friends.
So, no insight into what went wrong but the name Borland has very positive associations for me, and it's safe to say their products played a role in the course my life took.
My initial answer is "hell no" but on second thought I maybe need more context. As others asked, how much do I expect it to generate? How much do I have to play with? Am I a BigCo with an end of year departmental budget to burn?
Even then, 30k for a single page, which I assume is static, is kinda ridiculous. The only justification I can think of is very, very good design from an expensive design agency.
For the dev work we are talking paying someone $300 / hour for over 2 weeks. Seems out of my reality.
(author here) That's a nice twist on the idea! You got me wondering whether a lottery win would change my plans. I love working on Vendure, I consider myself extremely lucky to be able to do so full time.
Thanks for the kind words, and good to hear you have open-sourced the admin panel app - I feel that is really key for allowing devs to quickly get a feel for using the system.
And yes, I'd be really interested to chat! You can email me at "contact at vendure.io"
There is a compelling argument for headless e-commerce, which is the _freedom to build and rebuild your storefront using the technologies that you want_. With non-headless (traditional) platforms, you are limited to using the templating features or themes provided by the vendor. Another benefit is the ability to power multiple clients (web, mobile, in-store) from a single API & back-end.
A full refresh of the storefront using the latest technologies or developer workflows can prove either impossible or incredibly challenging. That's why there are a lot of e.g. Magento projects stuck with huge JS bundles and unpleasant developer ergonomics. Ultimately there is the risk of needing to "replatform" - re-build the entire solution (front-end and server-side) on a different framework/platform, which is not a desirable situation to be put in.
That said, headless has its trade-offs. Building a storefront is not trivial. For many merchants it may not make sense. But for a certain class of use-cases it is a massive advantage.
It should also be noted that "headless e-commerce" has also graduated into buzzword territory, so you might get an inflated impression of the relative importance or use of it. Even Magento & Shopify are leaning into "headless" despite their clear interest in the monolithic model which is relied on by the majority of their marketplace offerings currently. Other platforms (e.g. Saleor, Sylius) which started off as non-headless have recently re-branded as headless.
Ultimately there is definitely hype in this area, but there is also genuine value too.
Source: I've been developing a headless e-comm framework for the past 3 years (vendure.io)
I'm the maintainer of Vendure, so I might be able to offer a bit of insight on your second question, after having studied the Medusa repo a little. Medusa devs, please correct me if any of this is wrong!
* The Vendure project is a bit older and I think a bit further ahead in terms of awareness and adoption.
* Medusa lists a team of 10 on their notion board, plus a bunch of investors. Vendure is just me (plus OSS contributors) and is bootstrapped.
* Medusa exposes a REST-style API, whereas Vendure uses GraphQL.
* Medusa seems to be mostly JS built directly on Express, whereas Vendure is TypeScript built on NestJS.
* We're both using TypeORM for the data layer.
* As mentioned, Medusa does not ship with an admin interface, whereas Vendure does.
* Medusa seems to have a whole bunch of supported integrations in the monorepo (Stripe, Adyen, Klarna, Sendgrid, Twilio), whereas Vendure does not currently have any official integrations like this.
* Vendure supports multi-channel, multi-language stores. Could not see much about Medusa's support for that, but maybe I missed it.
All in all, Medusa is very much the most similar project I've seen to Vendure. The Node ecosystem has long been neglected in terms of e-commerce dev tooling, so I'm glad to see more interest in this area. Full-stack JS/TS/Node can be very productive and really nice to work with, in my experience.
Congratulations to the Medusa team for the launch. Slightly envious that your post has gained so much traction compared to the ~3 upvotes from my launch a few months ago, but no hard feelings, haha.
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.