Over the last year, I’ve hit a ceiling. As a developer I've found it hard to grow Isoflow past the 50 customers it currently has. As an alternative route, 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. So how do I justify open-sourcing 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 to do for Isoflow's future (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 believe the future is full of diagramming tools that help us learn faster and grasp ideas more easily). But what really convinced me are the examples I've seen of other diagramming SaaS's that benefit from open sourcing their cores (Excalidraw and React-flow to name a couple). 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 finding the repo and then driving through to the SaaS, sponsorship, or custom support requests coming in from companies), and so everyone wins.

I'll be working to release Isoflow under the MIT license, you can find the start of the open-source project here at https://github.com/markmanx/isoflow (feel free to star!).