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Re:Look for the duct tape by greysteil on Saturday March 24, 2018 @11:16AM (#16666993)
A qualified "yes".

Dependabot has ~100 paying customers, and makes just over $2,000 a month. It's still quite a lot of work adding new features, but if I wasn't extending it's functionality it would be passive income.

Personably have raised money and landed some big paying customers - I think there's scope for them to be solving a relatively large problem, having started from a duct-tape fix.

The only proviso I'd add to the article is that sometimes the problems you find like this are small. Dependabot will never be a full-blown startup - it's scope is too small. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though - I think the problem has still been well worth solving thoroughly.

https://dependabot.com https://personably.co

Re:Look for the duct tape by biarity on Saturday March 24, 2018 @03:36PM (#16668429)
Don't any of the langauges you support have options to keep all dependencies up to date? Eg. By putting wildcards in version numbers
Re:Look for the duct tape by greysteil on Saturday March 24, 2018 @05:58PM (#16669234)
That’s normally an option for your manifest file (e.g., a Gemfile or package.json), but most production applications also (sensibly) use a lockfile. Updating the versions in that lockfile is what Dependabot is great for.