Open SaaS: fork it, or just use it

There's a lot of talk about a SaaSpocalypse right now, and most of it is about software stocks falling off a cliff. That's the boring version. The interesting collapse is quieter: it's the business model underneath, and it's been coming for a while.

Here's the version we believe in. Good software should come in exactly two honest flavors:

An open-source version you can fork. The whole product, a real license, no crippled “community edition”. Anyone who wants to build their own thing actually can.

A hosted version for everyone else, charged fairly for what you actually use. No data held hostage, no core features locked behind a premium tier, none of the usual tricks for milking a subscription.

What you pay for is fuel (we wanted to call it “gas”, but that's gotten a little too crypto-coded): the real infrastructure the product runs on. Hosting, database, compute, the AI it consumes. Plus a fair margin for building, operating, and maintaining it, because none of that runs itself.

That's the model, and it isn't hypothetical. LiveKit, Supabase, Plausible and others are already proving it works.

So we're launching a product line

We founded Kychee to build AI-native, voice-first consumer products. While we wait for realtime voice models to come down in price, we decided to spend the in-between putting this model into practice instead of just talking about it.

We call the line Open SaaS: we pick a piece of software the market has learned to overpay for, build an open version, and offer it both ways. Fork it, or just use it.

We'll start announcing products here shortly.

Follow along

Every product in the line will launch on this blog, with the repo public on day one and a hosted version you can just use.

If the model resonates, check back soon. Either way: fork it, or just use it. You're the point.

Kychee builds AI-native voice products and Open SaaS. Write to info@kychee.com.