Postcard is now open source

In 2022, I launched Postcard as a personal website + newsletter. I had deleted social media, and wanted a way to stay in touch with friends via email. It powers my personal website, philipithomas.com, where I've published monthly "What I'm up to" every month since.

Postcard's launch was well-received and thousands of people signed up. Today, many people continue to use and maintain their Postcard sites. Revenue is modest - I make dozens of dollars per month on it. But, I'm happy to maintain it because I believe dependable tools matter. Today, I still maintain Postcard and the hosted service runs on a Mac Mini on my desk.

I've decided to release the source code for Postcard. I update the service only occasionally, several developers have asked to contribute, and I no longer expect meaningful revenue from the project. Open-sourcing it feels right.

In the age of vibe coding, I think it would be fun to give people a working app they can customize. Postcard is a fairly simple application, written in Ruby on Rails, that works with few dependencies. So, it should be easy to run and customize.

In order to open-source Postcard, I made some changes to the code. Most significant is that I rewrote the application to support a "Solo" mode for running one single site, which simplifies the hosting and deployment for most open-source users. The hosted service runs in "Multiuser" mode to support multiple users, custom domains, payments, and other options. The codebase includes both modes on the same main branch.

Deployment is straightforward. A Dockerfile is included, and a render.yaml file lets you ship Postcard to Render with minimal setup.

Check it out, fork it, and let me know what you build:

github.com/contraptionco/postcard