Dub

What they built

Dub is a modern link management and attribution platform. On the surface it shortens and brands links. Underneath it tracks where clicks and conversions come from, so marketing teams can prove which channels drive real revenue. Steven Tey, a former Vercel engineer, made the core open source, which built trust with developers, then layered a paid product on top for teams that want analytics, custom domains and a proper dashboard. Framer, Perplexity, Twilio and Buffer are among the companies using it.

How they did it

Open source was the growth engine. Developers found Dub on GitHub, self-hosted it, and many later paid for the hosted version to skip the maintenance. Steven built it in public from the first dollar, sharing milestones and shipping in the open, which pulled in contributors and early customers at the same time. Being genuinely useful to engineers, then charging the businesses those engineers work for, is the whole motion.

The numbers

Dub started at that first $100 MRR milestone in late 2022 and climbed from there. Latka lists it at about $1.4M ARR as of mid-2025, which is roughly $117K a month (source). The figure is a public listing rather than audited accounts, so treat it as claimed.

What to take from it: open source is not the opposite of a business. Give away the tool developers want, then sell the hosting, analytics and team features their companies will happily pay for.