Philosophy
Your website is your web presence; you should be in control of it!
To the extent of my knowledge, before this project, there was no simple computer program that made it easy to self-host your own website.
You either have:
(1) Cloud providers that take away all the technical jargon but lock you in to their platform and infrastructure.
It's convenient, but they can kick you off, go out of business, continually increase their prices; all without recourse!
(2) Technical tools, jargon filled, open source tools for "self hosting".
Most of them are about helping you creating a confusing "cloud environment" on your own servers. Usually aimed at a certain class of tech enthusiasts whoenjoy wrangling with this kind of complexity!
Theoretically it gives you control, but the high technical barrier and the required time investment makes them a non-starter for many people!
Sprouts/Gardener lowers the technical barrier by collapsing the complexity of the underlying infrastructure so that it can provide an easy to use interface.
Unlike other tools, we do not assume any kind of sysadmin related experience. You never need to touch the command line, let alone edit config files!
Further more, it's just a regular computer program, not a platform.
You pay for it ONCE, and can use it forever!
If your VPS provider starts causing you trouble, you can easily move your site somewhere else! You are not locked to your current provider!
Larger Vision
Although the initial release of Sprouts focuses on templated static content, the vision is to enable people to operate a website where they can interact with visitors and foster a community.
The internet, at its core, is a two-way communication medium. At minimum, we need to have:
- Comments on published content
- Engaging discussion forums
- Chat rooms with browsable archive
In addition, we want to enable individual creators to run their online business more or less just on Sprouts.
For this to work, we need the following:
- Analytics
- Email Subscriptions
- Calendar Bookings
- Paywalled Content
- Members Only Area
The idea is to have all of this on your own website, not as a bunch of different integrations with external services.
You should be able to sell online courses, downloadable artifacts, podcast episodes, etc etc, all with no additional recurring costs beyond that of the storage and bandwidth costs from your VPS provider.
Philosophy Q & A
Q: Is this open source?
Sprouts/Gardener is not open source! It's a commercial product.
We have plans to make it source-available, meaning you can read the source and make changes to it for your own use.
We also release some components as open source, such as the reverse proxy HoTCo:RE, and the cross-platform GUI framework shi•rei.
Part of the reason why there's no easy to use self-hosting tool is that creating such a tool takes significant amount of effort, but there's no economic incentive to make it.
It's much more profitable for companies to provide a hosting platform to justify charging recurring fees, and increasing the fees significantly the more features you require out of the service.
As for open-source projects, they tend to be aimed at technical users. Since there's almost no way to make money out of building them, the motivation becomes gaining clout amongst technical peers. Almost no attention is paid to easy of use for non-technical end users.
There are exceptions, but they don't invalidate the rule.
The most common model of monetizing open-source used to be paid support (though it seems the trend is shifting towards providing managed hosting). In either case, if the product is easy to setup and maintain, there would be no reason for the users to pay for support or hosting, since they would be able to host for themselves and would not need support.