Gumroad’s source is available

https://github.com/antiwork/gumroad

jvns

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:

  https://api.paypal.com 
  https://api.stripe.com

tax stuff:

  https://api.taxjar.com
  https://api.vatstack.com (EU VAT)
  https://apiservices.iras.gov.sg

for iOS app (?):

  https://api.appstoreconnect.apple.com 
  https://api.storekit.itunes.apple

AI stuff:

  https://api.iffy.com  (AI content moderation)
  https://api.helper.ai (AI support)
  https://api.openai.com

other:

  https://api.easypost.com  (shipping labels?)
  https://api.sendgrid.com (email)
  https://api.pwnedpasswords.com (haveibeenpwned)
  https://api.worldbank.org (for purchasing power parity?)
  https://api.dropboxapi.com (for "upload from dropbox"?)

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.

https://x.com/shl/status/1908090697984426227/photo/1

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2407998

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

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.

tomhow

https://danb.me/blog/gumroad-is-not-open-source/

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].

0. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

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.

WhyNotHugo

Even more so for individuals.

_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.