Why I've decided to open source Isoflow

Isoflow was a free diagramming tool I launched back in 2020. It reached #1 on ProductHunt, and since then I've built it into a small SaaS offering both free and paid versions.

Over the last year, I’ve hit a ceiling with growth that I haven't been able to remedy with traditional marketing channels like Google ads and blog posts. As a developer I've also found it hard to focus on marketing; it's just not my strength. As an alternative, I've been thinking a lot more about open sourcing the diagram editor, but couldn't really get a full picture of the benefits until recently. The top question for me was always; how do I justify giving away the core of my SaaS business (which I've been working on for over 2 years as a solo developer), and is this the best thing for Isoflow's future from a business perspective (spoiler alert: yes!).

For one, contributing to OSS is A Good Thing(TM), and I believe it will ultimately make Isoflow into a better diagramming tool (which is important to me as I see diagramming tools as multipliers of knowledge transfer). But what really convinced me are the examples I've seen of other profitable SaaS's that benefit from open sourcing their cores (Revealjs, Excalidraw and React-flow to name a few). I'd like to live off my project someday, and previously where I saw more drawbacks than gains going open source, I now strongly believe that if Isoflow becomes a success on the OSS side, that success will feed back into the business side (for example, through people subscribing to the SaaS platform after finding the open source repo, or by offering custom support and development to customers).

I'll be working to release Isoflow under the MIT license, with a public repo to follow!