We are a small software company from Madurai, Tamil Nadu.
We build two open source platforms: GegoK12 — free school management software — and ChurchCMS — free church management software. Both are MIT licensed. Both are completely free to use, self-host, and modify. Neither has a paywall.
That is not an accident. It is a deliberate choice — and one we arrived at the hard way.
We Didn’t Start as an Open Source Company
GegoSoft began as a typical software services company. We built web and mobile applications for clients. We were good at it. But like a lot of development teams, we wanted to build products of our own — software that solved real problems for real communities, not just custom work that lived on someone else’s server.
We looked at two sectors where we saw the same pattern repeating: schools and churches.
Both were managing critical operations — student records, fee collection, attendance, communication — using spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and paper registers. Both had access to expensive commercial software that was largely designed for large, well-funded institutions in Western markets. Both were underserved by anything affordable, modern, and genuinely fit for their context.
So we built for both.
ChurchCMS came first — a full church management platform built on Laravel and Vue.js, with an Android companion app. GegoK12 followed — a school management system covering admissions, attendance, fee management, timetables, exams, and parent communication.
We launched both as commercial SaaS products.
What the Market Taught Us
The SaaS model struggled for both products, for reasons that turned out to be deeply similar.
Schools and churches are not like typical B2B software buyers. They are run by people whose primary calling is education or ministry — not procurement. Budget decisions move slowly. Trust in cloud platforms run by companies they have never heard of is understandably low. And the communities we were trying to reach — particularly in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia — had genuine budget constraints that made recurring dollar-denominated subscriptions a real barrier, not just a negotiating position.
With ChurchCMS, the moment that crystallised this for me was an email from a pastor in Kenya. He had found the product, loved it, and wanted to know if there was a self-hosted version — because his church had a developer who could set it up locally, but they could not commit to a monthly subscription in foreign currency. He was not asking for a discount. He was asking for the software.
With GegoK12, the pattern was the same. School principals in tier-2 and tier-3 Indian cities, administrators at low-fee private schools in Nigeria and the Philippines — people managing hundreds of students with real administrative complexity, who needed exactly what we had built, and for whom the subscription model was simply not viable.
We had built the right products for the wrong business model.
The Open Source Decision
We released ChurchCMS under the MIT licence first. The response confirmed what we had suspected — when the paywall came down, adoption accelerated in exactly the markets we had hoped to reach. Churches in Nigeria, Kenya, Philippines, Brazil, and the United States started deploying it. Developers in those regions started contributing to the codebase.
We made the same decision for GegoK12.
Both platforms are now fully open source under the MIT licence. The complete source code for both is on GitHub. Any school, any church, any developer anywhere in the world can download, deploy, modify, and use either platform — forever, without restriction, without asking our permission, without paying us anything.
The MIT licence is deliberate. We chose it specifically because it places zero friction between the software and the people who need it. No copyleft conditions. No attribution requirements. No commercial use restrictions. If a developer in Lagos wants to deploy GegoK12 for ten schools and build a services business around it, the licence actively encourages that.
The Philosophy Behind It
When we talk about open source at GegoSoft, we are talking about something more specific than a licensing choice. We are talking about who software is for.
The mainstream edtech and church tech industries are almost entirely designed for institutions in wealthy markets with IT budgets, credit cards, and broadband infrastructure. The products are good. But they are not built for a school in rural Tamil Nadu, or a church in Nairobi, or a low-fee independent school in Manila.
These communities have the same administrative problems as their counterparts in the United States or Germany. They need the same features. They deserve the same quality of software. The only thing that differs is their ability to pay a Western SaaS price.
Open source is the architectural choice that makes software genuinely accessible across that gap. Self-hosted software runs on local servers — which means it works within local infrastructure constraints, local data sovereignty requirements, and local budget realities. MIT licensing means local developers can build sustainable service businesses around it without dependency on a foreign company’s pricing decisions.
This is not charity. It is a design choice about who the software is for.
How We Sustain It
The obvious question is: if the software is free, how does GegoSoft survive?
The answer is services.
For both GegoK12 and ChurchCMS, we offer managed hosting, one-time installation, and custom development. Schools and churches that want the platform without the technical responsibility of running a server can pay us to host it. Those who want to self-host but need professional setup can pay for installation once. Those who need features built for their specific context can commission custom development.
The software is free. We charge for our time.
This model works better than our SaaS ever did, for a simple reason: when someone can fully evaluate the software before paying us anything, the decision to pay for services is a confident one. There is no buyer’s remorse. No “this isn’t what I expected.” They have already run the platform, tested it with their own data, and decided it solves their problem. At that point, paying for professional hosting or installation is an easy decision.
Open source also creates a distribution network we could never have built with sales headcount. Developers who deploy GegoK12 or ChurchCMS for institutions in their network are doing meaningful distribution work — because it serves their interests, not ours. That kind of organic growth does not happen behind a paywall.
What This Means in Practice
GegoK12 is free, open source school management software that schools can self-host, own completely, and run indefinitely without paying anyone a recurring fee. It covers the full scope of school administration: student admissions, attendance tracking, fee collection, timetable management, exam results, parent communication, and staff management.
ChurchCMS is the same model for churches: free, MIT-licensed church management software with member directories, giving tracking, QR attendance, event management, and an Android app.
Both are active in multiple countries. Both have developer communities contributing improvements. Both are available on GitHub.
If you are running a school and looking for open source school management software that you can own, control, and run on your own infrastructure — GegoK12 is built for exactly that.
If you know a church that needs the same thing, ChurchCMS is at churchcms.app.
The Longer View
We are a small team. We are not trying to become the next Oracle or Salesforce. What we are trying to do is build software that genuinely serves communities that the mainstream industry has priced out — and run a sustainable business around the time and expertise it takes to support that software professionally.
Open source is what makes both of those things possible simultaneously.
The school in Madurai that deploys GegoK12 on a local server and never pays us anything is not a lost sale. It is the point. Every institution that gets properly administered software — that tracks its students accurately, collects fees reliably, communicates with parents effectively — because we removed the paywall is the reason we built these platforms.
The revenue comes from the institutions and developers who want professional support on top of that free foundation. That is enough. It is more than enough.