How I Grew My Open Source SaaS to $17K/month

The open-source version is identical to the cloud SaaS; developers can self-host it but must do the hard work (approve every social provider's API themselves). Invested in self-hosting docs. Treat it as a free tier with no usage cost to you: developers won't pay, but they spread the brand to non-developer colleagues, post about self-hosting on social media daily, write blog posts and reviews (SEO), get listed in high-authority directories, contribute and report bugs fast, and recent commits signal an active product.

Treat the GitHub repo as your marketing landing page, even more carefully than the website (see the Postiz repository). If a known product exists, describe yours as 'an open-source alternative to [it]' for the fastest context; if it's new, explain it fully. Pick a license (MIT, Apache 2 or AGPLv3).

Create GitHub issues for features you want built so visiting developers can ask to be assigned instead of figuring out what to work on. Open a Discord server so developers can join fast (copy the Postiz Discord channel list). Write deployment docs and ship a Docker image; without easy deployment developers churn, don't clone, and the repo won't trend.

Goal: get into the main GitHub trending feed by sending maximum traffic in the shortest time. Prep: register on Hacker News ~2 weeks ahead; build Reddit karma first or posts get filtered; set up Lemmy, dev.to, Medium and HackerNoon accounts. In one week: publish articles, Show HN, r/selfhosted and cross-posts, Lemmy, plus any X, LinkedIn and newsletter audience, all linking to the GitHub repo. Repeats this every week.

Write an article on dev.to, Medium and HackerNoon about how you built something in your project or that you just launched it; later write listicles like 'top 10 open-source projects to check in 2026'. Google Discover drives most of the traffic to these articles, so invest in the title and cover image like a YouTube thumbnail. Goal is stars and trending, not just SEO.

Submit a post titled 'Show HN: [project name]' linking to the GitHub repository rather than the main website. HN is picky and front page isn't guaranteed, but open-source projects have a very high chance.

Self-promo gets filtered or banned elsewhere on Reddit, but r/selfhosted wants open-source posts, including every new version. Post monthly with each release listing the new features; be humble and down to earth, write like building in public, say 'I' not 'we', and ask for a star. Cross-post to r/webdev and r/programming, and for AI projects r/LocalLLaMA, r/agent or r/langchain.

Lemmy, a self-hosted Reddit alternative, is unusually receptive to open-source projects. Post there as part of the launch week and for later updates.

Uses Outranking to publish one SEO article per day; Semrush and an Ahrefs dashboard ($20/month) for SEO research.

Every account gets a public API key to automate social posting from workflows such as n8n or direct API calls. Being open source makes developers prefer it over closed alternatives.

Four tiers (Standard, Team, Pro, Ultimate) differ by number of social channels and by features. Aim is to land users on Standard and upsell them on features rather than only on channel count.