My App Got Better When I Stopped Selling It
Software that serves one
Two weeks ago, I open sourced Deltabadger. Since then, it's consumed my life 24/7—hard to write about anything else. So, today some thoughts from those busy two weeks.
Why Does the App Feel So Much Better?
I must confess: I enjoy running the app locally more than I expected.
Recently, I’ve heard an interesting idea: why do AI agents struggle so much interacting with the web? Because the web is adversarial. There are a lot of things to prevent hacks, bots, malicious behaviors, all of which make the experience worse. Things break easier, and internet connection issues annoy everyone.
However, on your local computer, you feel safe and cozy. No CAPTCHA, no 2FA, no “low wifi signal.” Everything works fast, and the app is smaller because it has only one person to serve: you.
This is how the app feels run locally. It’s small, fast and to the point.
More importantly, it’s the “sovereignty” I’m looking for right now. One dependency less, no server subscription needed. More on that later.
Open Source is Life
Although regulations killed the app as a business, open sourcing resurrected its community. When the app was running without any problems online, the app Telegram channel was dead. Things are working, nothing to talk about. I knew that I have users because of looking into statistics and occasional direct messages.
It’s great to see the channel alive again, and getting real feedback from people trying to install the app on different platforms. That’s pure joy.
The six years of my work is now public. Even the depressive October and November when I desperately looked for ways to save the product as a business. It’s all out:
And it already has surprising consequences: it looks like the link from a big public repository boosts the pagerank. Ahrefs bumped DR +7 points in the last week alone.
Development is Cheap Now?
It's a ridiculous thing to say, but stripping out all the business logic made the app better. No paywalls, subscriptions, referral program, CAPTCHA… who needs that? From a user perspective the experience is now clean, smooth, and the app is fast.
But from a development perspective, removing 50% of moving parts allowed me to finally update the whole stack to modern architecture, and you know who else loves it? LLMs that can now understand the code better and solve every problem on the spot.
Wouldn’t that be great to always try first build something as cool and simple as possible, and add the whole “business bloat” to it only later and very carefully?
The work I did in the last two weeks—deploying for multiple platforms, adding new features—shocks me, even though I've been shipping code with AI for two years. The most expensive part of building online products suddenly became the cheapest one. I’m not exaggerating. It really is, and it exposes something that was always true:
Ideas can now be verified much quicker, and bad ideas are still bad.
From here, I can take Deltabadger into any direction, but the success or failure is just on me, and there is no longer a place to hide if my idea sucks. It’s no longer because I didn’t have capital to bring it to life. This excuse is gone.
There Was No Better Time to Build
The original 1989 Prince of Persia video game was created and programmed by one person, Jordan Mechner. He did everything except the music: programming, animations, the script and level design.
With better hardware and the internet, software became a monstrosity and modern AAA game titles are written by hundreds of people and cost millions. One of the things AI revolution does, is that it brings power back to solo creators.
I never felt more capable of doing stuff on my own. Only today, I implemented a small feature in the app, deployed fixes for Windows version, assisted some users with their installation, and now I’m finishing my Substack article.
If you have ideas, you have to build. And I still do have ideas.
Umbrel
Looking for the default platform recommendation for Deltabadger users, I was prompted by some of them to look into Umbrel, and boy, did I catch the bug for it.
There is something beautiful about running your own small personal “home server,” with things like maybe your personal Bitcoin node, tracking portfolio with Rotki, and now also running Deltabadger bot. I feel like this is the perfect ecosystem for the app, and I plan to spend the next weeks to both explore Umbrel myself, and making sure Deltabadger offers a smooth experience for Umbrel users. More on it soon.
That’s it for today.
Hi, Jan really loved the article.
Really Appreciate all the effort you are putting into this, it has not gone unnoticed with the community, im goin to run deltabadger locally for time being, myself on my server then look into umbel, hopefully you can help me a little along the way, it would be much appreciated, and for your help last night I would have been lost without you, so from the bottom of my heart and the community Thank you
Of course I remember Prince of Persia! And your enthusiasm for keeping things alive and developing them further is highly contagious.
I'm also about to order the Umbrel Box, but I'm still unsure how much storage space I need and what makes sense in terms of future developments. Have you thought about that yet? Best regards