Fizzy is our fun, modern take on Kanban (and we made it open source!)

· open-source · Source ↗

TLDR

  • DHH’s team launched Fizzy, a lightweight Kanban board app, open-sourced under the O’Saasy License with a $20/month SaaS tier.

Key Takeaways

  • Fizzy offers 1,000 cards free; unlimited usage costs $20/month as a hosted service.
  • The codebase is fully public on GitHub under the O’Saasy License: free to self-host, but SaaS commercialization rights are reserved for the creators.
  • The same code runs both the SaaS product and self-hosted instances; accepted GitHub contributions ship to both.
  • Planned data portability will let users move between self-hosted and managed instances in either direction.
  • Built on Rails; the full pull-request history is public, making it an explicit learning resource for modern Rails app construction.

Why It Matters

  • Open-sourcing the exact production codebase with full history is a concrete hedge against SaaS lock-in and company pivots.
  • The O’Saasy License pattern lets creators monetize SaaS while giving users a real self-host escape hatch, not just source visibility.
  • Committed community contributions already shipping to production shows the dual-distribution model working in practice, not just in theory.

DHH / world.hey.com · 2025-12-03 · Read the original

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