Included
- Emails sent roughly every two weeks.
- One real project that is free to self-host and still has to pay for itself.
- What I tried, what happened, and what I learned from it.
Notes on monetizing open-source software
In 2024, I could not imagine how Dawarichcould ever make money.
Today it has paying users and supports a team of two. This newsletter is not a product diary. I use Dawarich as a case study because it is the project I know from the inside.
Newsletter launch
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Countdown to 00:00 Berlin time
Join the waitlist before launch and the newsletter is free for you. After launch, it will be a one-time payment of €14.99.
New issues · roughly biweekly
Dawarich today
- Stars on GitHub
- 10,000as of September 2026
- People registered
- over 10,000since launch
- Self-hosted instances
- over 5,000seen in the past year
- Location points stored
- over 150 millionin one Postgres database
- Contributors
- 65on GitHub
- Years running
- 2since 2024
- Still free and self-hostable
- Yesunder the AGPL
I won’t publish revenue. I can share conversion, churn, traffic, and how many signups ever import any data.
Who is writing this
I’m Evgenii Burmakin. I live in Berlin and I have a day job writing Ruby, so Dawarich has been an evenings-and-weekends thing since 2024.
I started Dawarich because I wanted to self-host my location history, and the tools that existed were too limited for what I needed. The repository has over ten thousand stars now and more than sixty people have contributed code to it. In 2025 my co-founder and I registered a UG in Germany. He runs the mobile side.
Dawarich remains free and self-hostable. I’m building a paid service around it without taking that option away. I answer most of the support mail myself.
None of it is finished, which is most of the reason I’m writing it down now instead of in five years, once I’ve had time to tidy up the parts that went badly.
- Built
- Dawarich, an open-source location history app. AGPL, self-hostable
- Based in
- Berlin, since 2022
- Day job
- Senior Rails engineer, at a company that is not this one
- Spoke at
- Geomob. The talk won a prize
- Covered by
- XDA Developers, MakeUseOf, c’t Magazine, It’s FOSS, Linux Unplugged
Why write about it now?
For the past two and a half years, I have been learning how to build a business around Dawarich while keeping it free to self-host.
Most of the decisions, mistakes, and context still live in my head and in Telegram messages to my co-founder. That is not much use to anyone else.
You can find plenty about maintaining open source and plenty about running a subscription business. I found much less about doing both at once. I had to work out what people might pay for when the same software is free, how to test that market, how to price the hosted version, and how to support users in the time I have.
I decided to compile those notes into this newsletter. It gives me a way to share what I have learned and document the path for myself while the details are still fresh.
What you will get
Not included
- There is no course or paid upsell at the end.
- This is my company, so I am not a neutral observer.
- What worked for a location-history app may not work for your project.
- I will share metrics, but I will not publish revenue.
Who should subscribe
This may be useful if
- You maintain something people actually use and it makes no money.
- Raising money is not the plan.
- You want an honest account of what worked, what did not, and why.
- You are curious about an unusual way to test a market and enter it.
Probably not for you if
- You want a launch trick that works this month.
- You think open source is a business model on its own.
- You are looking for a licence that solves it.
Questions
How often will you write?
Roughly every two weeks. I don’t know yet how many issues there will be.
Is it free?
If you join the waitlist before launch, the entire newsletter is free for you. After launch, it will cost €14.99 as a one-time payment, not a subscription.
Do I need to use Dawarich, or even care about it?
No. It is the example I happen to have. Whether any of it transfers to your project is something you will have to judge as you read.
Will you show real numbers?
Most of them. Conversion, churn, traffic, how many signups ever import anything, what a given channel returned. Not revenue.
What happens to my email address?
It goes to a mail server I run. I don’t rent the list out and there is no tracking in the emails. Every issue carries an unsubscribe link.
When does the first issue arrive?
The first issue is scheduled for 1 December 2026.
Join the waitlist
The first issue goes out on 1 December 2026. Join the waitlist before then and the newsletter is free for you. After launch, it will be a one-time payment of €14.99.