How We Make Money Giving Away Software

Miru is MIT-licensed. The full source code is on GitHub. Anyone can clone it, run it, modify it, and never pay us a cent. We also charge $1 per person per month for the hosted version. Some people look at those two facts and ask the obvious question: how does that work?

It works fine. Better than fine. Here’s why.

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The Cost Structure Is Different

We’re based in Pune, India. Our team lives there. The cost of great engineering talent in India is a fraction of what it costs in San Francisco or London. That’s not outsourcing — it’s our company, our city, our people building our product. The math just works differently when your burn rate isn’t Bay Area burn rate.

We also run a consulting company, Saeloun. We build Rails applications for clients. That business pays the bills and keeps the lights on. Miru started as an internal tool — we needed to track our own time and send our own invoices. When we open-sourced it, we weren’t betting the farm. We were sharing something we’d already built for ourselves.

This is the part that people miss. Most open-source companies raise $50M in venture capital and then scramble to figure out monetization. We started profitable. Miru is upside, not survival.

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Why $1 Per Person Works

Let’s be honest about what time tracking software costs to run. It’s a Rails app with a PostgreSQL database. Solid Queue for background jobs. Solid Cache for caching. No Redis cluster. No Elasticsearch. No Kubernetes. The infrastructure cost per customer is measured in pennies per month, not dollars.

When your cost-to-serve is near zero and your development costs are covered by a profitable consulting business, you don’t need to charge $10 per seat. You don’t need to gate features behind enterprise tiers. You can charge what feels fair and still have healthy margins.

At $1 per person per month, a 50-person company pays $600 a year. A 200-person company pays $2,400. That’s real revenue at scale, and it comes with near-zero sales cost because the product sells itself. No demo calls. No SDRs. No AEs. You sign up, you use it, you upgrade when you’re ready.

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The Self-Hosted Customers

Here’s where it gets interesting. Some companies — especially in regulated industries, government, and finance — won’t use hosted SaaS. They want the software on their own servers. They want control over the data. And they’re willing to pay for deployment support, maintenance, and SLA guarantees.

Those customers pay $1,000 or more per year. For them, the value isn’t the software (it’s free). The value is having a team that knows the codebase inside-out available when something breaks at 2 AM.

This is the open-source business model that actually works: the software is free, the expertise is not. Red Hat proved this at scale. We’re doing it at a scale that makes sense for a small, profitable company that doesn’t need to be a unicorn.

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The 37signals Lesson

DHH and Jason Fried have been saying this for twenty years: you don’t need to grow at all costs. You don’t need venture capital. You don’t need to capture an entire market. You need enough customers paying a fair price to support a team that builds great software.

We took that lesson seriously. Miru doesn’t need to be a $100M ARR business. It needs to be a good product that solves a real problem at a price that doesn’t make people wince. $1 per person per month is that price.

More companies should try this. Build something you actually use. Charge what’s fair. Keep costs low by being thoughtful about technology and team size. Skip the fundraising circus. It’s not as sexy as a TechCrunch headline, but it works. And you get to keep your company.

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The Bet

Our bet is simple: if the product is good enough, people will pay $1. If it’s not, they won’t, and we’ll still use it ourselves every day. There’s no downside. The worst case is we built a great internal tool. The best case is thousands of teams use it and a few hundred pay for hosting or support.

That’s a bet worth making.

Use the hosted version free at app.miru.so. Or self-host from GitHub and never pay anyone anything. Either way, the code is yours.