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Ask HN: Can a CLI tool be monetized?

8 points| thiht | 1 year ago | reply

I’m working on a CLI tool to automate integration tests declaratively (think: test API calls and their results, manage DB fixtures, make assertions on anything observable you can think of).

I would like to monetize it somehow, because I think it’s a tool that can bring great value to companies, and I would like to generate some passive income from it. My current plan would be to distribute a version with only common integrations, and leave "enterprisey" integrations (Kafka, AWS, xUnit reports…) in a paid version. I still have no idea what a proper system would be (one time fee, company subscription, maybe depending on the size…)

Does anyone have experience regarding monetizing a CLI tool? I have a hard time finding examples of what could or wouldn’t work.

8 comments

[+] ActorNightly|1 year ago|reply

Some experience in this with a different personal product:

The issue with CLI tools is that they are going to be used by engineers, so you have to offer way more value then what it takes someone to search github for a python script and run it. This is very hard to make.

Whereas if you make something that has an intuitive front end, non technical people can learn to use it, and would pay money for it.

[+] sandreas|1 year ago|reply

There are indeed commercial cli tools. One example I came across is sourceguardian[1], which is a command line tool to "protect" your PHP source code by encrypting it. This way you can put it on a server that is not controlled by yourself without risking rip-offs.

However, it does not only contain a cli tool but also a free PHP module to load these encrypted PHP files as well as other tools.

The licensing is pretty hard to get around, it uses a hardware id registered via online server, so you can't easily use the software on a device without having it properly licensed. Protecting your work will be a high amount of monetizing it.

1: https://www.sourceguardian.com/

[+] Tabular-Iceberg|1 year ago|reply

What a bizarre product. Why would an encryption algorithm care about what language the plaintext is written in?

[+] gtirloni|1 year ago|reply

Push the logic to the backend and access it with CLI, web client, etc. Is it being a CLI a core design feature?

[+] thiht|1 year ago|reply

That’s not an option in my case. I don’t want to make my tool artificially dependent on a backend when it’s not needed, it would be crippling for no reason. Also it’s a testing tool that should be able to run on CI, so being dependent on a server (even self hosted) is a no-go.

Even if I come up with an idea that requires a backend at some point, chances are it would be a whole different product, because I wouldn’t want to add in this tool.