Stay away from open source

Don’t use open source if you’re not a developer. I mean it. Stay away from either cheap or open source software if you don’t belong to the geek club.

Open source has been praised a lot, more so in the last couple of years, but people fail to see the price that comes with free code. Most of the time, it’s more expensive than the most expensive software you could get.

Contrary to popular belief, the great majority of open source projects are not meant for the average user to download and run on a hosting account. They are unpolished, buggy, and generally, because of its own community, serving more than one purpose. Open source is always meant to be used as a starting point for something bigger.

More than often I hear potential costumers asking us to justify why we charge them a monthly subscription for our hosted ecommerce solution when they could just install Magento on a $4 a month hosting account. We try to explain some of the reasons, but if I were to list them all we would be tangled on the phone for a few hours. The main reason is simple: open source is expensive.

Most of the time, by the time you install the code on your website you already need some custom developing on the side or you’ll certainly need it in the long run when your company grows and your requirements change. No matter when that happens, it will happen, and when it does, you’re introduced to the free software hidden costs. Then you’ll have to defocus from your business so you can learn how to go after developers, learn how to explain what you need in a way they’ll understand, learn how to work with developers, and then, after all that, pay them. All this learning takes a lot of time and resources you could be using to build up your business.

The same goes for cheap software. Companies that undervalue their product are not only bound to failure, but even worse, many already know it. That’s the reason why you see a lot of them selling cheap lifetime licenses of their software. It’s the best way of saying “Hey, I know you won’t be here for too long, so we’ll just make a quick buck and soon when our solution doesn’t fit you anymore you can just throw it away, which doesn’t matter because we’ll already have our profit.”

Lifetime licenses are outdated strategies used by companies with short customer lifecycle, and it goes without saying that customer lifecycle is the best metric for knowing how good, or how bad, a product or service really is.

I’m not saying open source is bad, au contraire, it’s great when you know what you’re doing, but it can be disastrous when you don’t.

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