Vemetric is now Open Source

I’m excited to announce that Vemetric is now open source! This is a big milestone for me and the product. By making Vemetric open source, I’m taking a step towards greater transparency, better community collaboration, and extending the market of privacy-focused Web & Product Analytics.

Why Vemetric is now Open Source

As a software developer, I owe so much to open source software. Over the past years, I always wanted to get into open source, but wasn’t sure how I could align that with the goal of making a living from my own products. With Vemetric, I’m finally giving this approach a chance.

So what I want to achieve with this:

1. Transparency: Vemetric promises to be a privacy-first analytics tool. By open sourcing the code, everyone is able to inspect the code and ensure that Vemetric holds up to this promise.
2. Marketing: As a solopreneur, it can be hard to spread the word consistently. I hope that the open source movement will help me to get more people to know about Vemetric.
3. Community: By opening up the codebase, I’m inviting developers worldwide to contribute, suggest improvements, and help shape Vemetric’s future.
4. Self-hosting: While not available yet, I’m planning to provide a self-hostable Community Edition of Vemetric with all core features included for free.

What does it mean for you?

From now on, you can inspect the codebase, review it, and make sure that everything works as you’d expect it to.

If you find anything we should take a closer look at or think should be improved, please create an issue or a new discussion in our GitHub repository.

You’ll also be able to see future developments and can learn from how Vemetric is built.

Community Edition (Self-Hosting)

While it’s not available right from the start, I’m going to work on a Community Edition, which will be a prebuilt version of Vemetric that you can host on your own server.

The community edition will be operated under an open-core model, meaning:

• Core features will be available for free under the AGPLv3 license
• Regular updates and security patches
• Some premium features will remain in the cloud version only

Which License is being used?

Vemetric is released under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPLv3). I chose this license because:

• It ensures that any modifications to Vemetric must also be open source
• It requires that any service using Vemetric must make its source code available
• It prevents closed-source forks while allowing commercial use

I still want to build a profitable business around Vemetric in order to make it a sustainable product, and the AGPLv3 license helps me to protect it from bad actors.

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This means you can:

• Use Vemetric’s codebase for any purpose, including commercial use
• Modify the code to suit your needs
• Distribute your modifications (must be under AGPLv3)
• Use it in your own projects

At a later point, it’s likely that there will be features which are not available under AGPLv3. These features will then only be available via our Cloud offering and are not part of these license terms.

Contributing to Vemetric

A big benefit of open source is that it allows external contributions more easily. If you’re interested in contributing, please take a look at the Contribution Guidelines.

In general, I’m looking forward to these kinds of contributions:

• Reporting a bug
• Discussing the current state of the code
• Submitting a fix
• Proposing new features

In case you’d like to contribute bigger changes to Vemetric, like a new feature, please first create an issue or discussion in our GitHub repository. I have a clear vision of how Vemetric should evolve and don’t want you to waste your time with things that don’t align with it.

Final Words

This is actually a big step for me. I also wrote a blog post about it on my personal blog, but to sum it up: I’m very excited about this journey and what it will bring.

If you find Vemetric useful, please consider giving it a star on GitHub. Your support helps to spread the word! 😄

I love to be as open about my business as possible, and apart from being open source now, I’ve been building Vemetric in public for several months already. I share my learnings and achievements on X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Threads, so feel free to follow me there in case you’re interested.

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