I launched Filestash [1] as my response to the infamous “Dropbox should just be FTP” comment. Once I had a decent FTP experience, I kept going: adding support for pretty much every storage protocol, plugins to expose Dropbox (or anything else) over FTP, SFTP, MCP, or S3, and all the features I wished Dropbox had, with plugins to customize everything.
The base product is open-source and I make money from custom builds, additional plugins, paid support, and the occasional extra feature for companies with specific needs. It's a bit more than noodle profitable but quite under a normal salary.
Where is the dropbox-part in this? This seems to be a filemanager for remote storages, which is kinda the opposite of dropbox, which is mainly a local service for syncing data. Or did the documentation missed explaining the sync-function?
What a blast from the past. I attempted to build a file-sharing tool for my team when we had video and images strewn across the org. I prototyped embedding filestash for the frontend.
It was basically a backend for generating STS credentials on the fly using a more ergonomic interface. It never went anywhere and I haven't thought about it in years, but I still believe it was a good idea that I just didn't have the organizational clout or time to push forward.
Edit: apparently I contributed at some point too? I *barely* remember that. Glad to see the project is still succeeding!
I found a typo: "Apply fined grained access control to keep your shared content under control." should be "fine-grained access control".
The faux screenshot of HN tickled me.
This could probably be more profitable for you with better tagline/explanation!
I have the context for what "that comment" was, might even be in the target audience, yet from the landing page I'm still not entirely sure what it actually does. Might be worth trying a few "it's like X but with Y" or "imagine if dropbox could Z" and other formulations on uninitiated people in your target audience?