It’s completely open-source and it’s our mission to make sure these are always 1-click deployable to PaaS like Vercel and Railway.

We also are not like other opensource that depend on external services like Clerk, Resend, other external SaaS. All you need to deploy Openfront and Openship is Node and Postgres.

And the stack is completely agent-first. Next.js, Tailwind, GraphQL powered by Prisma and Keystone.js. Openfront is meant to be taken and adapted by each business. Like if your barbershop wants to sell merch, you can tell your agent to bring in features from e-commerce to the barbershop. We believe this is the future versus SaaS now, where you have to go into settings and configure everything. The future is changing the SaaS at the code level with an agent that has access to the code, deployment, etc.

And what's wrong with that?

Shouldn't we encourage more companies starting like this, have a (permissive) open source platform anyone can use, while also offering a commercial managed service.

It's a model that's been around for a long time, but is now gaining more traction thanks to AI commoditizing software development. And I think it's an improvement over the closed-source giants we are used to having dominate each market (and strangle customers through annual price increases, especially when acquired and their investors are looking to squeeze out a return).

unfortunately, this openship thing is copyleft though, so not particularly permissive vs. Apache 2.0 or MIT-licensed alternatives, but still...

Openship is an order management system. I built that first when I used Shopify. Then it was easy to build my own which became Openfront. Think of Openship as a the glue between Openfronts so businesses can buy from other businesses.

Happy to answer more questions. We’re making open source alternatives to Shopify, Toast, GlossGenius, MindBody, Booksy, Cloudbeds, Dutchie, etc.

Another AI fever dream.