Postiz · open-source social media scheduler
Make your whole app free to self-host and charge for the hosted version
$17K MRR in a crowded category; daily posts from developers self-hosting it
Workedpositioning-nicheword-of-mouthseo
What they did
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.
What happened
Credited as one reason Postiz reached $17K MRR among thousands of scheduling tools; daily user-generated posts and SEO from third-party articles
- Stage
- growth
“So, our open source is the same as our SaaS offering. Developers can come and just self-host this on their machine, and they will need to do all the hard work.”
“So, every time I go and I search for Postiz on social media, every day I see some post about some developer trying to self-host Postiz.”
“So, I see tons of SEO, just from people writing about how to use Postiz or putting a review about Postiz somewhere.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Postiz: Write your GitHub page like a landing page: 'the open-source alternative to X'
- Postiz: Before launch, post starter tasks on GitHub, open a Discord, and add one-step setupSays developers churn and it won't trend without easy deploy docs; no numbers
- Postiz: Send all your launch traffic to GitHub in the same week to hit trendingSays stars, Discord joins, issues and forks jump once trending; no numbers
- Postiz: Write launch articles on dev.to, Medium and HackerNoon with strong titles and cover imagesGoogle Discover is the top traffic source for his articles; no numbers
- Postiz: Post 'Show HN' with a link to your GitHub repo, not your websiteFront page likely for open source, worth about 10,000 views
- Postiz: Post each new version to r/selfhosted every month, humbly, and ask for a starFounder says the subreddit welcomes repeat release posts; no numbers
- Postiz: Post your open-source project on Lemmy, the self-hosted Reddit alternativeAt least 100 upvotes on every post
- Postiz: Publish one SEO article every day with an AI writing tool
- Postiz: Offer a public API so developers can automate posting from their own toolsFounder says many use it and developers prefer it for being open source
- Postiz: Push people to higher plans with extra features, not just more channels