Show HN: Ringer – Get and provide expert help on Open Source Software (ringerhq.com)
Over the past few months we've been building Ringer, an Experts Marketplace focussed on Open Source Software. We want to help make Open Source more sustainable and believe that we can be a part of making that happen.
We're approaching this from the perspective of the individual developer - if you contribute to OSS then you can register instantly with your GitHub account and list yourself to provide paid support, knowledge and help for the repositories that you contribute to. We only allow those who we can prove contribute to repositories to list themselves as experts, and show details of contribution history for the experts in the system so that customers can see exactly how the experts can help.
We process payments to over 100 different countries via Stripe, and handle all of the paperwork to make the process as frictionless as possible, including 1099s for US based experts.
We're building out tools to improve the developer experience at the moment, and have started to work with customers to design a process that allows them to access expertise quickly whilst working within the constraints of an enterprise environment.
For the past 3 or so weeks we have been in an Alpha stage, so this is our Beta launch - we are really open to fresh ideas and opinions. From day 1 I have said to every developer that I have spoken to that whether you love the idea or hate it, all I want to know is why and what we can do better - so HN, please tell me what you think and want it to be!
57 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadThe other remotely similar service, Tidelift, has unacceptable terms and conditions: for the compensation they decide "at [their] sole discretion", "[i]f you do not satisfactorily provide the Services, Tidelift may, at its option and without limitation, (a) require you to immediately re-perform the applicable Service at no additional charge; and/or (b) reduce the fees paid, or due to be paid, to you for the applicable Service in an amount commensurate with the cost to the Subscriber to cover the breach and/or the cost to Tidelift to assist its Subscriber with covering the breach." Quotes taken from the May 2022 "Lifter Agreement", which I was asked to sign for the monthly equivalent of what a professional charges for 30 minutes of work.
I hope that Ringer will prove a real contact point between Free Software professionals and professional users.
As a long time open source developer, I find that the managing payments part takes up way too much time.
Also I've been told that it is very difficult to find/connect with expert developers. I don't get this but hey if Ringer can help here, that's great too!
There's probably a content marketing side of this as well. If you really have the experts on a wide variety of open source projects, you could write high quality "when to choose X" blog posts. You could back that up with various measures of project health, host round tables where people discuss competing projects they have experience with, etc.
I would guess that *when* you achieve support for those other (and especially self-hosted), then you'd up your game massively in the eyes of the open source software community. Of course....i acknowledge that this is not a small nor easy nor fast thing to achieve. ;-) Best of luck, and i really love this idea that you have! (I'll be joining soon)
We'll have to see if this gets abused. I wonder if folks will sign up as "ringers" for repos that they want to sabotage? That could be awkward. I do know that kind of spitefulness exists (I've had people do some really petty swipes at me).
Also, we may not be as useful for some repos, as for others. For example, I was the original author of a project that I turned over to a new team, a few years ago. I could answer some basic "why?" questions, but would be useless for current stuff.
Would there be some way to "score" for that? Also, maybe some folks would only be useful for subsystems of an aggregate project, that might be in a monorepo.
We're looking at thresholds to stop malicious behaviour but at the moment will manually police it until it becomes too much.
We are also rolling out a way to show which skills you have in a project - so perhaps you want to mainly support architecture or training rather than code review - that will come soon, which may help with the original author point.
I'd love to make our scoring system really robust, and that is the plan, eventually!
https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
Excellent work here, going in the right direction.
https://www.samba.org/samba/support/
Edit: GlusterFS has one too:
https://www.gluster.org/community/consultants/
Edit: unfortunately iFAX doesn't list other companies on the HylaFAX support page, but probably being active on their community support could get customers.
https://www.hylafax.org/support/
I'm wondering what Ringer will do for these kind of case.
Or if Ringer is only for GitHub libraries, or smaller projects or...
I want to allow it, but I need to work out a way to do so whilst making sure that we don't end up with a free for all - that means manual review perhaps, but I agree that it would be very helpful if we can make it work.
Re GitHub - we've built on GitHub initially but would love to extend to other platforms in time!
I would say to maybe allow verified contributors/experts to invite others in under their account, and let them work from that context until they have enough feedback that they should be invited to join independently of their previous sponsor. My only real doubt is that even being a known contributor is going to be gamed unless there are clear processes for vetting and distinguishing between even the people who are verified contributors to a project, because some will be experts and some will not be.
edit: One suggestion - maybe have a discord server that people provide support through, that way there's already an (IM-based) comm channel setup. Would def reduce the friction for me (and increase the chances I become a repeat customer)
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hire.sr.ht https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-08-23-how-does-our-consultan...
https://sfconservancy.org/
https://www.ringerhq.com/terms-of-service
Why won't you notify about changes to the terms? At minimum a notice at login would be a good idea.
Maybe add some links to Wikipedia for the (presumably USA?) laws users are prevented from using the site when affected by the laws.
Wow, it is long. Please add a summary to https://tosdr.org/ :)
I do think there's a challenge in that... as a developer, paying $58 for half an hour that may save me 8 hours is a no-brainer, but this feels like a difficult thing to ask "the boss" to pay for. It gives off Fiverr vibes, and usually there's much more ceremony around billing contractors/consultants.
But if you pitch this to big business needing big support (a context in which this feels like a stupidly good deal), it may also drive up the price by changing the expectation from the ringers as to what they are providing.
I'm rambling, I know... I wish you luck. I'm definitely watching this space. It seems like you've found a definite potential market, but I think it's going to be hard to capture it.
I do think there is a balance, especially when the request comes from an individual vs a business and we're actively looking into ways to solve this. I have partially realised that educating developers on value driven pricing is going to be part of my job now!
Thanks for the well wishes!
Basically, they curated both sides of the market and it worked really well and removed them from the bottom feeders race
I've tried platforms like this and have secured basically zero revenue from any of them so I'm hesitant to go through the whole stripe setup process unless I get some confirmed work out of it.
So my suggestion is to allow maintainers/dev to show up to potential clients before having them go through the whole stripe process.
You can stay that way until you receive a request, which you cannot accept until you have set up payments.
[1] https://www.ringerhq.com/u/become-a-ringer
>We process payments to over 100 different countries via Stripe
You'll want to make an PO process + credits model for big companies ASAP. That's where the money is.
[1] https://www.ringerhq.com/i/docker/compose
These are people who are being paid, right? I mean, I'm sure that plenty of adults get sick of hearing questions about subtraction and multiplication from 6 year olds, but as teachers it's their job and pays the rent. A platform facilitating paying for expert help seems like the ideal place for shitty questions to be asked, rather than cluttering up forums begging for charity.
edit: Assuming no cheating is involved, what's wrong with paying an expert to help you with your homework? I think that a marketplace for expert help is flawed if you can't use it to find tutors.
It is well documented that people are not that money motivated past a certain point. After that job satisfaction, respect, recognition, etc are much better motivators. You can only have a successful experts platform if you're able to recruit and retain those experts, otherwise you've just built a new Fiverr.
>I mean, I'm sure that plenty of adults get sick of hearing questions about subtraction and multiplication from 6 year olds, but as teachers it's their job and pays the rent.
Considering the teacher crisis right now, that's not a compelling example IMO.
>edit: Assuming no cheating is involved, what's wrong with paying an expert to help you with your homework? I think that a marketplace for expert help is flawed if you can't use it to find tutors.
Nothing wrong with it per say, but a site oriented towards tutoring is a different product IMO with a different kind of person you need to recruit. I don't think most experts want to be tutors or would make good tutors in the first place.
I don't think that all people will inevitably be disappointed, disrespected, or go unrecognized for answering someone's simple question for money. I also don't think these things can be disentangled from pay: if you pay me what I want you to pay me in order to ask a basic question, I will be pleasantly surprised, feel like the questioner really values me, and build up recognition as it leads to more work.
> Considering the teacher crisis right now, that's not a compelling example IMO.
The teacher crisis is about not being paid, and being abused.
> a site oriented towards tutoring is a different product IMO with a different kind of person you need to recruit.
If I have a team that needs to know a particular package that there's no established training for, a contributor who knows it well could be a lifesaver. I'm no professional teacher (and honestly pretty impatient) and I've given talks/classes to both teams that I have been on, and other teams who needed expertise that was locked in our team. There doesn't have to be some caste system, and there's no reason to think that all contributors to a FOSS project would either be terrible at or reject work that requires their expertise rather than their line count.
How exactly do you validate experts? Are you just going by merged PRs (this might be somewhat exploitable though minor PRs, if you're successful I'd assume)? I imagine checking for the quality of PRs would be way too time-consuming to do manually... Do you consult the maintainers of a repo?
I was using a few open source packages - TipTap, YJS, ProseMirror - but I had a particular use case that the docs simply didn't address (long story). It was the kind of help that would really require at least an hour sit-down with a very experienced developer to brainstorm with me on a solution, but there's not an obvious marketplace for that kind of touchpoint.
Yeah - this is where I see us fitting well. It's not really the standard install/import and you're done issues that docs deal with. It's the niche problem <> niche expertise area where I believe we can excel - these tend to be very competent teams or developers who would be willing to take that hour and pay for it because the value is high enough.
They released an example for a block based text editor here: https://liveblocks.io/examples/block-text-editor-advanced/ne...
And as for CRDT and conflict resolution they have the Storage Block that's handling all of this. You can do offline/online and undo/redo quite easily.
I keep sending you example cause I'm a visual person :P, but look at that interactive article and let me know what you think: https://liveblocks.io/blog/how-to-build-undo-redo-in-a-multi...
The danger of success in this case might be a slow creep in requirements to 'be on Ringer or we do not want it' for FOSS projects, or if ringer gets bought by LinkedIn or something like that, that would be bad as well.
What's to stop someone from purposefully giving bad advice for his amusement?
An expert can only be an expert on a repository that they have a history of contributing to, so I would hope that that would have an effect on the advice they give. If they still chose to give bad advice then I would be disappointed.
> An expert can only be an expert on a repository that they have a history of contributing to
This is what I mean. Not everything happens in a repository like this. Unfortunately, I'm in the overwhelming minority here, but I still wanted to comment on this.
> If they still chose to give bad advice then I would be disappointed.
It's something to consider, for it will happen.
It would be nice if it would list ones where anyone was actually interested in support. Or notify me once someone was actually trying to get an expert.
So I would know that there is any point on setting up my profile for given repo.
On the client side, you are competing with Stack Overflow or opening issues, which is free. You want to replace that with paying someone whose only credential is having gotten 1 PR merged in the target project, and "All purchases are non-refundable".
On the "expert" side, you provide a platform with very low pay, very short-term contracts working with randos, and you have no track record of payment or mediation.
I am not sure how you can possibly get this to work.
Your ToS also has major red flags:
> As a user of the Site, you agree not to: [...] Disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.
> We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue all or part of the Site without notice at any time. We will not be liable to you or any third party for any modification, price change, suspension, or discontinuance of the Site.
You might as well make a "Log In with Facebook" step into the workflow for people, to "prove that you're human".