Openwhyd, staying alive thanks to DigitalOcean! 🕺
Published on December 10, 2025 by Adrien Joly
Once again, we are thankful that DigitalOcean decided to keep sponsoring Openwhyd by offering credits that cover our hosting and backup costs!
To celebrate this long-lived partnership, let’s remind ourselves the story of Openwhyd (formerly known as Whyd) and how DigitalOcean has helped us grow all along.
First experiments
Back in 2010, Whyd was a new startup company founded in Paris, at a time when startups were still rare in that area. Our vision was to connect people in a more emotional way than social networks of the era. By empowering users to discover and share art that they love.
We had the chance to receive a first round of seed funding quite early, which allowed us to develop several iterations very quickly, with a differentiating user interface design, to gain some press coverage and to showcase our work in the Silicon Valley, by staying there for several months.
In order to prevent our data-heavy service from going down during peak traffic, we needed a hosting provider with fast storage access. At that time, DigitalOcean were getting famous for offering VPS hosting with SSD hard drives, which was not common yet. So we decided to trust them for hosting whyd.com.
Transition to Open Source
Despite our efforts and impressive user retention figures, we were struggling to monetize and grow our user base enough to motivate investors for a new round. Many competitors challenged Whyd.com but most of them were shut down a few years later. The music discovery market was a tough one to crack…
That struggle lead to lead software engineer Adrien Joly (yours truly) to leave ship, and Whyd’s founders to pivot a designing a connected speaker.
Quickly after being selected by Y Combinator for several months of business acceleration, they realized that maintaining Whyd’s music discovery service had become a burden that was slowing down the development of their new product.
Still in touch with them, Adrien offered to open source the service and to maintain it on his spare time so he (and thousands of other regular users) could keep using it. Whyd’s founders accepted that offer and transferred the source code and control of associated services (including DigitalOcean) to Adrien.
At that time, there were still plenty of credits left on DigitalOcean to keep Openwhyd (new name of Whyd, after open sourcing it) online, but this wouldn’t last years because he hosting costs were very high. Indeed, we had never taken the time to optimize the service for cost reduction.
Sustaining Openwhyd as a non-profit
In order to keep Openwhyd online for many years without making money, Adrien took several initiatives:
- optimize the service to reduce hosting costs
- setup a crowdfunding account on OpenCollective, so users can contribute financially, e.g. for yearly renewal of domain names
- document and add automated tests run by a continuous integration pipeline, to welcome contributorsÂ
- give conference talks to get developers to know openwhyd, give it stars on GitHub, and contributeÂ
- ask DigitalOcean if they can help us with hostingÂ
These initiatives have convinced DigitalOcean to cover our hosting and backup costs, since 2017!
Thank you, DigitalOcean, for helping us keeping Openwhyd online!
Great holiday season to you all, and never stop jamming! 🎶Â
Adrien Joly
Maintainer of Openwhyd.org
To celebrate this long-lived partnership, let’s remind ourselves the story of Openwhyd (formerly known as Whyd) and how DigitalOcean has helped us grow all along.
First experiments
Back in 2010, Whyd was a new startup company founded in Paris, at a time when startups were still rare in that area. Our vision was to connect people in a more emotional way than social networks of the era. By empowering users to discover and share art that they love.
We had the chance to receive a first round of seed funding quite early, which allowed us to develop several iterations very quickly, with a differentiating user interface design, to gain some press coverage and to showcase our work in the Silicon Valley, by staying there for several months.
In order to prevent our data-heavy service from going down during peak traffic, we needed a hosting provider with fast storage access. At that time, DigitalOcean were getting famous for offering VPS hosting with SSD hard drives, which was not common yet. So we decided to trust them for hosting whyd.com.
Transition to Open Source
Despite our efforts and impressive user retention figures, we were struggling to monetize and grow our user base enough to motivate investors for a new round. Many competitors challenged Whyd.com but most of them were shut down a few years later. The music discovery market was a tough one to crack…
That struggle lead to lead software engineer Adrien Joly (yours truly) to leave ship, and Whyd’s founders to pivot a designing a connected speaker.
Quickly after being selected by Y Combinator for several months of business acceleration, they realized that maintaining Whyd’s music discovery service had become a burden that was slowing down the development of their new product.
Still in touch with them, Adrien offered to open source the service and to maintain it on his spare time so he (and thousands of other regular users) could keep using it. Whyd’s founders accepted that offer and transferred the source code and control of associated services (including DigitalOcean) to Adrien.
At that time, there were still plenty of credits left on DigitalOcean to keep Openwhyd (new name of Whyd, after open sourcing it) online, but this wouldn’t last years because he hosting costs were very high. Indeed, we had never taken the time to optimize the service for cost reduction.
Sustaining Openwhyd as a non-profit
In order to keep Openwhyd online for many years without making money, Adrien took several initiatives:
- optimize the service to reduce hosting costs
- setup a crowdfunding account on OpenCollective, so users can contribute financially, e.g. for yearly renewal of domain names
- document and add automated tests run by a continuous integration pipeline, to welcome contributorsÂ
- give conference talks to get developers to know openwhyd, give it stars on GitHub, and contributeÂ
- ask DigitalOcean if they can help us with hostingÂ
These initiatives have convinced DigitalOcean to cover our hosting and backup costs, since 2017!
Thank you, DigitalOcean, for helping us keeping Openwhyd online!
Great holiday season to you all, and never stop jamming! 🎶Â
Adrien Joly
Maintainer of Openwhyd.org