Piotr Kulpinski got cloned so many times he packaged the clone, and turned the copycats into a second business

The weekend project that works is rare enough. The weekend project that is still throwing off $80,000 a year two and a half years later, on two hours of maintenance a week, is a different category of object. Piotr Kulpinski built OpenAlternative across 48 hours in February 2024, hand-collecting about seventy open source projects into an Astro site backed by an Airtable, because he wanted a decent list of open source alternatives to proprietary software and the good ones kept going stale.

Launch week brought more than a hundred thousand people. He made his first sale on day one, then deliberately waited a full year before putting real paid options on it, which is the opposite of what everyone tells you to do and is exactly why the thing has an audience that trusts it. Today it runs about 70,000 unique visitors a month and pushes roughly 20,000 clicks a week to the projects it lists, which makes it a real distribution channel for open source software, maintained by one person in Krakow. Understand how unusual that is. Directories rot; it is the natural state of the form. The curated lists you bookmarked in 2019 are dead links now, because somebody stopped checking them. His has not rotted in two and a half years, and the reason is that the checking is the product and he still does it himself.

Then everybody copied him

Here is where most people write a thread about it. Directory sites are easy to look at and hard to get right, and OpenAlternative was very publicly getting it right, so the clones arrived. Same layout, same categories, sometimes the same copy.

Piotr's read was that the cloning was information. People were not stealing because they were lazy; they were stealing because they wanted this specific machine and had no way to buy one. So he spent two days pulling his own customisations out of the codebase and five days writing the landing page and the documentation, and in early 2025 he put it on sale as Dirstarter. Seven days, start to finish.

It has 183 customers now and does around $5,000 a month, and the pricing walked from $97 to $147 to a two-tier $159 and $199 as it earned the right to. The first twenty or thirty buyers came from one small link on OpenAlternative. That is not luck. That is what a year of building something in the open and not asking it for money pays back the moment you finally have something to sell. "Code is not the moat anymore," is how he puts it. He is right, and he was early enough about it to build the business the observation implies.

The Kraków method

What makes this repeatable rather than lucky is that he has done it again and again. DevSuite for developer tools. TerminalDock for terminal apps. DomainRapid, which generates domain names and, in a genuinely restrained bit of product design, only shows you the ones that are actually available. Revinel, for automating ad spots. Each one a directory or a small utility, each one shipped alone, each one indexed.

"The beautiful part is that each new listing I add creates a new indexable page," he says about OpenAlternative, and that sentence is the whole strategy. He is not writing content and hoping. He is building objects whose growth and whose search footprint are the same action.

EuroAlternative is the one that shows the timing instinct. Launched in mid-2025, it maps 433 EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant tools across 34 countries onto the 350 American products European teams are trying to move off. "European teams keep asking the same question: which EU tool can actually replace the US one we're on," he told the press when it went out. A directory guy in Poland pointed his format at digital sovereignty roughly a year before every procurement department in Europe needed exactly that list.

The through-line is a conviction that small finished things beat big unfinished ones, and the nerve to keep acting on it while everyone around him goes the other way. The fifteen years inside agencies and product teams are why the solo work moves this fast: he is not learning the craft on his own time, he already has it, and a weekend is enough because he knows exactly which corners are load-bearing. Everyone else is raising for the platform. He is in Kraków shipping the twelfth directory, and the twelfth directory is paying.

If people were going to copy me anyway, why not make it easier for them and make some money in the process?

Piotr, on deciding to sell the thing everyone was cloning