Gumroad’s source is available
204 comments
·April 4, 2025jvns
ricardobeat
That's pretty refreshing compared to the average 400 external "partners" your average online t-shirt store has.
rafram
Most of those are probably indirect. Same here: Stripe doesn’t issue credit cards or even process transactions itself. It partners with a half-dozen or so credit card networks, and each network partners with thousands of banks around the world.
rmason
It launched right here on HN 14 years ago.
Aurornis
Gumroad became my cautionary tale for startup equity for early engineers.
I remember excitedly following the story from start. It was fun to follow along. Then around 2015 things weren’t working well, so they laid off most of the team. Investors sold the company back to the founder at a steep discount. As I recall, a major investor sold their ownership for $1.
Just like that, the founding engineers who worked so hard lost their jobs and saw their equity valued down to nothing.
It happens! However, the strange thing in this case was that the company kept going. They had laid (almost) everyone off and declared their equity worthless, yet the company was still making money and growing. My younger self struggled to understand how the founding engineers could have gone from working so hard on something to being laid off and seeing their equity wiped out while the business itself continued right on working and generating revenue.
A lot has been written to put positive spin on those events. The founder claims to have helped out some of the early engineers in vague ways. However, I’ll never forget being a young, aspiring startup engineer and watching an entire startup team get wiped out of the business they helped create and then the business just kept on trucking for the founder who walked away with ownership of the company.
tuhins
I was one of them! Joined on August 5, 2012, got 0.5% of equity (I think?), it all went to more-or-less zero monetarily. I don't think most of us really hold any grudges against Sahil here. It was a very fun place to work, and I met some of my closest friends and made some of my strongest professional connections there. It was net-very-positive to my life and career, and I think we were all adults when we were opting-in to the experience.
As for Sahil/Gumroad making money and growing. Meh. He's worked on it for 13 years and showing dedication beyond what I would have for most things. It's fine.
adrr
How did lose all their equity? You can’t declare equity is worthless. You can raise new rounds with different valuations and dilute previous investors/employees but they would also dilute themselves.
hobofan
Even if they don't "lose" their equity, it might just turn essentially worthless. Very often "equity" founding staff receives is in the form of (V)ESOP s = (virtual) employee stock options, or other equity grants that only materialize in the case of an "exit event". Depending on how the exit events are specified in the contract, the founder taking the company private (/ divestment from the investors) might have resulted in an exit event with $1 value of the company.
rahimnathwani
Google 'drag along rights'.
jokethrowaway
A friend built a startup for years and progress was not looking good. Eventually the entire development team quit and left without equities. The founder was then acquired for millions.
Another case: startup running out of money after a series B or C and a history of questionable expenses. Everybody but a few left. The founders sold their main product for cheap to some private equity firm, focused on a crappy internal tool they built and they used their last money to hire a literal army of sales people.
These sales guys were apparently amazing and somehow managed to sell the tool to a bunch of fortune 500 companies and are now making bank.
The main product they sold? It's still on life support, the original buyer just sold it to another holding.
ihowlatthemoon
Original discussion thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2406614
occamschainsaw
Interesting discussion on the merits of the initial plan of a paid link shortening service and the opposite approach (easy-to-setup paid access to links).They were discussing adding Bitcoin as a payment method when it was 0.7 cents a pop.
spiderice
That part made me chuckle.
> At the current ~$0.70 / bitcoin, this means that every American will be able to have ~$0.05 in his or her electronic wallet, once all bitcoins are generated. Assuming that the rest of the world does not participate at all and that bitcoins are evenly distributed.
> Sure, you could imagine an instant dollar-to-bitcoin-to-dollar conversion at the point of payment. Or you could imagine a bitcoin2.org that generates more coins. Or you could hope for a massive surge in the value of the bitcoin.
> I'd put my money on Paypal sticking around, though.
Even back that people pointed out the obvious flaw of Bitcoin remaining at $0.70. But I wonder if any of them believed it would be at $100,000 in 14 years
owebmaster
One day work to start a multi-million project, 13 years ago. That's the real vibing.
ignoramous
Some might not be aware: It wasn't always smooth sailing for Sahil (could have had a much comfortable life if he stayed put at Pinterest). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37059594
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Multiplayer
I'm reading a lot of complaints here but let's recognize some interesting aspects that Sahil is talking about: 1. It's the 5th largest rails codebase open to AI ingestion. 2. They are offering bounties for issues. Not large bounties but whatever, it's something.
I personally like rails and would love to see AI tools improve with it. No idea if this code base will really help that, and when but it can't hurt. In my experience I can get next apps up in a jiffy but rails is much more of a struggle. If anyone has any tips here, please post.
I'm always curious about how well bounties work especially now in an AI age. I wonder what the arbitrage on AI spend vs. bounty will be for people that take a run at them.
irf1
I run a bounties platform (https://algora.io) and I've seen people who create bounties try to use some AI like Devin to solve them (@seveibar livestreamed trying it) just for fun and in all cases AI failed to solve the bounties.
A Rust project that rewarded 300+ bounties ($37k) is now building an AI coding agent with the aim to solve bounties on Algora - it's an interesting benchmark I guess.
Curious myself what the next years might look like, but from everything I've seen so far we're definitely not there yet.
hankchinaski
I don’t get the point on going open source aside from a tiny boost in marketing. What is the objective and proposition here? Considering as others have said is not really open source. If I were the founder I would not do that. It’s like if Airbnb went open source or something
insane_dreamer
The value of AirBNB is not in its code but in its network.
hankchinaski
And yet is never gonna be open source
Imustaskforhelp
Dear SHL , Please truly open source this. I personally wouldn't mind AGPL but would still much prefer MIT Thanks.
echelon
There's no way he's going to do that. The leverage and market advantage would evaporate.
deanc
It's in fact the market position (leader) that gives them the advantage here, not the code.
Imustaskforhelp
Well. Any suggestions please?
Though technically I don't mind it , its still great he source availabled it
I am probably not going to reach 1 mln $ sales but still man if I do , then I probably want some grace period and I mean ....
shipscode
It's pretty cool that this license allows you to make up to $1mm revenue, at which point you can pivot and rebuild the stack. This is going to be a game changer for anybody who wants to MVP an app similar to Gumroad. MIT would be ideal, but I prefer this to GPL's force release model.
fbn79
License is very limiting for Business
RobotToaster
Yeah, it's not open source, the licence violates point five of the OSD https://opensource.org/osd
snvzz
It's also not Free Software, as it also violates the Free Software definition[0].
Tomte
Of course. Has anyone ever found a case of a license that not one or the other?
The Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition are structured differently, but pretty obviously map from one to another.
arielcostas
Yeah, it's more of a "source available" than Open Source in its definition. I'd rather they use AGPL or something like that.
graemep
To put it another way they want to call it open source without actually being open source.
notpushkin
I don’t think they actually call it open source themselves – rather, the HN poster made a (probably benign) mistake.
captn3m0
> You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity. Adjust the revenue threshold for inflation according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics' consumer price index for all urban consumers, U.S. city average, for all items, not seasonally adjusted, 1982–1984=100 reference base.
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WhyNotHugo
Even more so for individuals.
Timshel
While limiting, it's not atrocious:
>You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.
handfuloflight
So if it someone uses this software to build a $10M GMV per annum business, it's completely unclear the pounds of flesh Gumroad et. al will want as their cut.
Timshel
Yes but before you reach this point you probably have a bit of time to start discussing with them ?
ZeroTalent
Use the source as inspiration and create something new in a more modern language/framework.
rustc
It would be a bad idea to read any of this code if you're working on a competitor based on the license terms.
_joel
An ecommerce platform designed to allow creators to sell to users.. apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumroad
soco
Which also dropped Android support, so I dropped them.
rchaud
Web app works fine. I'm an Android user, I sell through Gumroad and it's never occurred to me to download a native app that offers no functionality beyond what's already on the website. Sale notifications go to my email, as they should.
noname120
Any idea what the motivation could be?
verghese
Gumroad's journey has been interesting: https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting -> Billion dollar journey with VC backing to Kleiner selling back their stake to Gumroad for $1, which enabled Sahil to steer the company in a different direction.
Perhaps the shift to making the source available has more to do with work culture: https://sahillavingia.com/work
geenat
https://x.com/shl/status/1908146557708362188
Probably not entirely, but straight from the author.
spiffyk
Can't help but notice he's basically knowingly "donating" the code to multi-billion corporations to train their LLMs on (while in general those same corporations source their training data in ethically questionable ways), while mere mortal human individuals and small businesses are bound by a non-free license. An interesting decision to say the least.
s17n
i mean... what would any "mere mortals" use the code for other than to directly compete with Gumroad?
jslakro
Sahil anticipates AI will significantly commoditize software. Especially following DeepSeek's impact. He has promoted Devin via twitter and likely aims to position Gumroad as the leading creator-focused alternative to traditional Open Source e-commerce platforms.
psnehanshu
It's Rails!
niklasbabel
i believe Sahil mentioned they’re moving away from Rails soon, as he sees it as technical debt.
udev4096
What a joke of a license. This is not open source. Why the fuck is everyone in VC land trying to change the true definition of open source?
XCSme
Most of the VC open-source projects use open-source as a lead magnet/marketing tactic only, with no intention or desire of wanting people to actually use the software.
diggan
There is a distinction between those companies who actually license their stuff under FOSS licenses, but use it to get more marketing/contributors/whatever, and what companies like Meta are doing today, which is calling something "open source" in their marketing material, but if you read the terms and conditions, they call it "proprietary" instead and comes with lots of restrictions that aren't compatible with FOSS.
One is a marketing tactic, the other one is outright misleading.
preisschild
Yep. Bait & Switch. Which is exactly why you shouldn't contribute to open source projects that require a CLA.
graypegg
The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to do everything you might do with the software that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright, but only as long as you meet all the conditions below.
I think they probably meant
The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to do everything you might do with the software that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright [to the software], but only as long as you meet all the conditions below.
Awful license on multiple levels.
DetroitThrow
No you're not insane, it's much harder to follow than most source available licenses I've seen.
pseudalopex
> Why the fuck is everyone in VC land trying to change the true definition of open source?
They want the marketing benefits without the costs.
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jhanschoo
I think this reaction is misdirected. Yes, the license is restrictive, but Gumroad doesn't seem to be claiming themselves that the code is open source. I think OP made a mistake out of ignorance and said that it was open source.
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openthc
Which is super bullshit; cause now offering open source solutions many folk see it as a trick!
I tried to grep the code for `api.` to get a sense for all the vendors this codebase is using, and which you'd need to have relationships with to run the code. Here's what I found:
payments:
tax stuff: for iOS app (?): AI stuff: other: