Want to Stop Paying for Software? This Founder Has You Covered

.In this interview, Piotr Kulpinski shares how he built OpenAlternative, grew it to 70K monthly visitors, and monetized it to $3.5K/month, all while keeping it a side project.

Feb 19, 2025

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In this interview, Piotr Kulpinski shares how OpenAlternative helps developers and tech enthusiasts discover open source alternatives to popular proprietary software.

Piotr shares:

His backstory and how he started.
How he got his first free and paid customers for his product.
What was effective in attracting customers to his product?
His competitive advantages, what gives him an edge, and insights that have proven beneficial to his operations.
Which books, podcasts, or other resources have had the greatest impact on him.
Advice he'd offer to entrepreneurs who are just starting out.

Q. Hello! Who are you and what product are you working on currently, and who is your target audience(Age range)?

Hi! My name is Piotr Kulpinski and I'm the founder of a directory website called OpenAlternative. It's a community-driven list of open source alternatives to popular, proprietary software.

My target audience is mainly tech-oriented people passionate about technology, software development, open source, and online software.

Q. What is your backstory and how did you come up with your idea? What year did you start?

I have been collecting a list of open-source software for a while. Primarily for my own use (to learn and reuse parts of the code), but I thought it would be valuable to share it with others. I was also interested in learning more about SEO and growth, so I considered this a good project to experiment with.

I didn't want to spend too much time on it, so I decided to build it within 48 hours.

With such a short timeframe, I had to be very selective about the features I wanted to include. I decided to build a simple listing without search or filtering capabilities.

I started by expanding the list of open-source software. I used a combination of Google, Reddit, and GitHub to find the most popular open-source projects. I also drew from my own knowledge and experience to identify lesser-known projects that I thought were worth including.

I didn't want to include every open-source project I could find. I wanted to maintain a high-quality list focused on the most popular, useful software and actively maintained projects. I collected about 70 projects in total.

The site launched in February 2023, but no one really heard about it until March 2024.

Q. Take us through the process of building the first version of your product MVP

Astro was always on my list of things to learn. I've been using Remix and Next.js for a while, and I was interested in trying out a new framework. I decided it would be a good opportunity to build the site with it. This decision turned out to be a great one, as it saved me a lot of money on hosting costs later on.

For the backend, I opted for Airtable as a database. It's a simple, no-code solution that I've used before. It's not the most powerful database, but it's perfect for a project like this. I could easily add, edit, and delete records, and it has an embeddable form functionality that I used for user submissions.

With the data and the site structure in place, I started building the site. I used Tailwind CSS for the styling, and I was able to build the site in about 12 hours. The good thing about having multiple projects under my belt is that I can reuse a lot of code I've written before.

Building an open-source listing, it was pretty obvious that I should open-source the code as well.

To make the site more useful, I decided to include some data from GitHub. I built a scheduled Cloudflare Worker that pulls the GitHub API data to fetch the number of stars, forks, and issues for each project.

I also pulled some related tags from each repo, such as what programming language it's written in and what it's related to (e.g., CMS, CRM, etc.). I then put this data into Airtable and used it to generate lots of pages for programmatic SEO.

Q. How many employees do you have working on your product? Do you have any co-founders?

This is still a side project, so I'm handling it on my own. Recently, I began hiring a freelance writer to create posts focused on specific SEO keywords.

Q. How much monthly traffic do you receive?

The site currently receives around 70,000 unique visitors or 275,000 pageviews per month. I share the web analytics publicly, and they're available here.

Q. How did you get your first customers for your product and how many free/paid customers do you have currently? (Feel free to list them out).

If you've ever built a directory website, you know that it can be a great way to showcase a collection of resources, products, or services. However, monetizing a directory website can be a bit of a challenge.

I've experienced this firsthand. I quickly realized that earning money with OpenAlternative was going to be challenging. Once I saw the traffic I was getting from the launch, I quickly added a tiny banner to the site allowing people to pay $99/month for a premium listing.

Even though I was getting a lot of pushback in the comments on Reddit and Hacker News, I managed to get my first sale very quickly (on launch day). After that, I took the offer down and didn't monetize the site for a few months until I came up with a sustainable monetization solution.

Since then, I've managed to come up with several ways to earn money from the site: advertisements, expedited + featured listings, and affiliate links. From all of those sources combined, the site makes around $3-3.5K per month.

Q. Since you launched your product, What has worked to attract customers?

Given that it's a tech-related project, what has worked best for me is posting consistently on developer-related websites like Reddit or Hacker News. You have to be very careful not to get banned quickly there, so always try to provide value to readers and avoid being too spammy.

Q. How is your product performing currently, and what are your plans for the future? Can you share your current metrics and revenue figures?

I'm currently very happy with where OpenAlternative is. My north-star metric (open source website clicks) is growing every month, currently reaching 20K clicks per week.

I work hard to constantly bring new traffic to the website, though it can be challenging at times. I recently started putting more effort into SEO, which is my current focus.

The site is making around $3-3.5K per month, $1,200 of which is monthly recurring revenue (MRR) from featured listings.

Q. Since the inception of your business, have you gained any insights that have provided you with a competitive advantage and proven beneficial to your operations?

Since the website has been open source from day one, I get copycats almost every week. People launch direct clones of OpenAlternative, but none really stick around for long.

This taught me that the best competitive advantage is consistency and showing up every day. With AI capable of cloning any website within minutes, the only way to maintain an edge is by being persistent.

Q. What tools have helped you grow your product?

AI and automation definitely play a major role in the growth of the website. I managed to automate almost every crucial part of the business. From scraping through content generation and the sales process, everything is managed automatically. I can keep the site running by working only 2-3 hours per week on the project. The rest of my time is spent on growing the site and building other similar projects like DevSuite and others.

Q. Which books, podcasts, or other resources have had the greatest impact on you?

Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan has helped me tremendously recently. Its content perfectly aligns with my mission to build and validate new projects as quickly as possible and double down on the things that gain momentum.

Q. What advice would you offer to entrepreneurs who are looking to start or have just begun their journey?

Launch everything you build. Keep it as simple as possible and release it to the world. No one will ridicule you, and you'll quickly gain valuable insights, allowing you to determine if it's a success or not.

I never would have imagined that OpenAlternative would grow as big as it has, but I released it anyway to my 700 followers on Twitter/X.

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions! What is your contact info if people would like to inquire about your services? You can add all your links.

You can connect with me on X, my website and OpenAlternative

Let me know what you learned from this interview and have a productive week!🙏

Indie Tip Of The Week

Stop waiting for permission. Every broken system stays broken until someone decides to fix it. The best founders don’t wait for the perfect moment, they see a problem, take ownership, and solve it. Act like an owner, even if no one gives you the title. That’s how real impact happens.

Indie Product Of The Week

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Indie Trivia Of The Week

What notable astronomer penned the 1980 best-selling book “Cosmos?”

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