The future of Vemto

Hello everyone, I hope you are all well!

I thought a lot before writing this article, for several months. It was challenging to make this decision, but here we are.

TL;DR - Vemto 2 will become open source, but some features will continue to be available only to those who have the license, such as build downloads, auto-update, standard and NOVA CRUD generation, and email support.

The last two and a half years

About two and a half years ago, based on feedback from Vemto 1 customers and the growing need to update the architecture, which was very difficult to maintain, I decided to start developing Vemto 2.

My plan? To release this version in 6 months.

The main feature, which was mentioned countless times via email or conversations, would be synchronizing the code with the Laravel application. I accepted this challenge, thinking I knew how to solve it within those six months.

Oh, how wrong I was about the difficulty that lay ahead.

The 6 months soon became a year, a year and a half, and so on. I had taken on a difficult mission and made a promise, so I needed to move forward. Things that I thought would be possible (for example, changing migrations in real time) were simply impossible, and I spent weeks studying how to find a solution to these problems (for example, in this case, it ended up being the creation of a screen to review migrations and models before synchronizing).

After the first year of development, things started to get complicated. I practically stopped working on my other products to develop Vemto 2. The biggest problem was that Vemto was never the main revenue generator for my small company, but it was always the most complex to develop and maintain.

But I had to finish version 2. At that point, there was no turning back. The further I went, the more version 1 became a massive amount of legacy code, and the more evident it became that the only way was to finish version 2. So, I put a lot of pressure on myself and wrote a lot of code.

At the end of 2023, my wife found out she was pregnant, and a few months later, we found out that it would be a complicated pregnancy full of risks for the baby.

So, 2024 was one of the most stressful years of my life. I spent months and months coding until late at night, anxious about many things (including some problems occurring in the parental sphere). Then came the first Burnout. I had never experienced anything like that: I couldn't be near the computer, my heart would race, and a horrible feeling would take over me.

I took a few weeks off and managed to return, at the cost of a new problem: stress so great that sores appeared on my scalp, itching horribly in the early hours of the morning (something that has not left me to this day, but is much better, under treatment).

It's important to mention that another developer, Nicollas, works with me. He helped me a lot in the meantime, developing important features and fixing bugs. However, his main focus was always on maintaining my other products, and even though there were two people, it was still too much work.

Talita also joined the team to help me with customer service for other products, which helped me greatly with the work overload.

These two are fantastic and add a lot to the team.

Towards the end of the year, around August, the second Burnout hit. I won't go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that I thought about giving up programming. In September, my son was born via emergency C-section, but thank God both he and my wife were fine.

I took a vacation for the first time in many years to care for my son and wife (however, my mind was still racing with the project's future, the company, etc.).

I didn't know what to do. The project was already two years behind schedule; I couldn't even sit in front of the computer.

I decided to try to hire another person. I would have to pay him with the revenue from the other products, but that was okay. The important thing would be that Vemto is at least under development.

I believe that due to the nature of the situation, I didn't choose very well (I checked as much information as I could, I hired a seemingly senior with a lot of knowledge in the area, everything seemed ok, but I must have missed something).

I paid the amount for the first month of the contract in advance (what was I thinking? I made a big mistake here). But the only thing delivered in about 30 days was four lines of code (I'm not joking). There were several stories and excuses. Anyway, I canceled the contract.

But all of this contributed to my huge discouragement. There were too many things and worries, and I wasn't in a good mental state.

Another issue tormented me: As the years went by, more and more people were using AI to generate boilerplate for Laravel projects (exactly the type of problem that Vemto solved).

Added to the fact that Vemto was not ready and full of bugs, sales dropped drastically, and each time, Vemto became a project that was bringing losses to the company.

Around December 2024, I found myself researching other professions (things like working with wood, crafts, even selling wall paintings). I've always been passionate about visual arts (I'm not an artist, just an admirer).

But at the beginning of 2025, I rediscovered my passion for programming by doing something I've always enjoyed, and it's always been a hobby: game development. Nothing elaborate, just simple games made in my spare time or on the weekends (something I'm still doing now, I'm even slowly trying to create a game on Steam. I don't want to put my hobby aside anymore).

With that, little by little, I gathered the strength to work on Vemto again. With Nicollas' help, we rushed and fixed as many bugs as possible. We spent about 3 months focusing on Vemto again (which culminated in us finally releasing the template editor, with several features added to the template language).

This happened around the time of the launch of Laravel 12, which arrived with a new wave of new features and templates. We could barely maintain the current templates (Jetstream, Breeze) and new options appeared (I ended up deciding not to adapt the new templates, it would be a new Herculean task, and we have several priorities). I also decided to cut some promised features to keep the focus on the most praised part of Vemto (schema creation and code generation).

At least this effort was worth it. Vemto 2 is quite usable and has few bugs. Now it lacks a few of the features of Vemto 1, the main one being plugin support (which I intend to implement soon).

Meanwhile, my other products remained on the sidelines, a situation that could not last for much longer. We released a few versions of Vemto with all these improvements, but sales simply did not go anywhere.

I asked Nicollas to return to the other products and I continued on Vemto alone for a while. Until I noticed signs of a possible third Burnout again. At that point I decided to stop and move on to other projects. I couldn't take that risk.

But what to do with Vemto? And my customers?

I confess that if Vemto has reached this point, it is out of respect for you, my customers. For the people who bought annual or lifetime licenses, and believed in my word.

Internally, I wanted to simply abandon everything. I just wanted to get out of this spiral of stress, anxiety and absurd pressure. But that would mean throwing away all the work done, and it would also mean leaving aside all the customers who believed in the project.

Furthermore, Vemto has not been economically sustainable. But at the same time, I don't want the project to die. I believe that Vemto is an important project, and that it can help many people develop Laravel projects more quickly and efficiently. I don't want to disappoint the people who believe in it, and who believed in me. I wanted to find a solution that would be fair to everyone.

I considered several possibilities.

1. Sell the project - I thought about selling Vemto, and I even talked to a company that had been interested in it in the past (a company that I was sure would take the project seriously), but the conversations didn't progress. Furthermore, I was completely honest with them about the project's situation, so I believe that also contributed to the lack of interest.

2. Hire someone - but I didn't have the money for that anymore, it was risky for the other projects, and the previous experience wasn't good. Vemto needs someone dedicated, and a good programmer is expensive.

3. Open the code as Fair Source - I considered this for a while, but it didn't seem fair to me. Fair Source means that the code is open, but it's not open source. It doesn't seem fair to me that other people can make contributions, but they can't use the code in an open way, or that they have to wait two years for the contributions to become truly open source.

Fourth option: open source the code

During all this time, many people have offered to help with the development of Vemto, but I have always refused, because I do not believe it is fair to accept third-party code without the project being open source (and still make money from it).

However, I am no longer concerned with making money from Vemto. My other projects are enough to maintain the company and pay the bills (it is a small, humble company, but it has been sustainable). Vemto is no longer a project that generates profit, and I do not want it to die. So, why not open source the code?

But, out of respect for the people who bought licenses in the past, I have decided that some features (only those that were developed within my company, never features contributed by other people) will continue to be available only to those who have the license, such as:

• Download builds (I will make the builds available on our website for those who have an active license). Other users will be able to compile the code from the source code, but they will not have access to the ready-made builds (similar to what Aseprite does)
• Auto-update (Vemto will continue to check for updates, but only users with an active license will be able to automatically download the updates).
• Generation of common CRUD with Livewire (except Filament, which will also be available in the opensource version)
• Generation of Laravel NOVA CRUD
• Support via email (support via email will continue to be available only for users with an active license).

I do not intend to sell new licenses for now.

Vemto will continue to be developed, and I am planning things like support for Filament 4, but I need time to fully recover and return to developing calmly (I am much better now). But I will continue to serve and respond to our customers, as I always have.

By the way, I apologize if at any time in these last years I seemed rude or did not serve you well. I really have not been very well.

When and how will this happen?

It will take a few months. For now, I will continue fixing bugs, and I intend to finally write the Vemto 2 documentation. Believe me, I feel guilty for not having written it yet. But all this time, I had to choose between fixing bugs so that the project would be minimally usable, or writing it.

In addition, the testability of Vemto 2 is compromised. When I started it in 2022, it was completely TDD. The big problem is that Vemto 2 was a discovery process. So I quickly switched to developing tests after the features were implemented. Over time, the sea of ​​bugs and the lack of time, I relaxed and many tests were left aside (except for the template engine and RelaDB, which are 100% covered by tests, thankfully).

I intend to rewrite and complete the tests before releasing the code, thus facilitating future development.

Luckily, we already have good documentation of the architecture, so that will make things easier.

So, what I intend to do before releasing the code:

1. Write the v2 documentation
2. Increase test coverage
3. Implement plugin support
4. Remove the exclusive parts under the above license and bump our 1500+ commits and tens of thousands of lines of code to a new public repository

I haven't decided on the licenses yet, but they will probably be:

• MIT: for the Template Engine (which is already released as OpenSource), RelaDB (the database/ORM behind Vemto) and the documentation. Maybe Vemto 1 source code, but I'm not sure yet about that
• AGPL-3.0: for the Desktop application (I'm thinking about a copyleft license because I don't think it's fair for another company to use our code that we built over years, at high cost, without contributing).

However, I'm totally open to discussion about the best licensing model, etc. I haven't decided on that yet.

I also intend to release the code gradually to our customers, before making it fully opensource.

If you have a license and would like to take a look at the code or help, send me an email and I will add you as a contributor once I have things sorted out.

Some questions and answers

I have already talked to some clients about this issue a few times, and I am often approached with similar questions, so I intend to answer them here:

1. Why don't you hire someone else? - As explained, our company is small and limited in resources. A good programmer is expensive, and the project has not been profitable. Besides, I have tried once and it didn't work out very well (I know I could try again, but now is not the ideal time)
2. Why don't you generate documentation and tests with AI? - It was not for lack of trying. I have been using AI as a tool since the beginning (since the time when Copilot was free). In my day to day, I am used to using these tools. I may be wrong, but I believe I know their limits well. AI is great for generating internal technical documentation of the code (with a lot of supervision, of course), but generating documentation for the use of complex software like Vemto? I don't think so, and in our tests, it never did well. The same goes for application testing. It can generate a boilerplate, some simpler tests, but most of the work will be manual (and of course, we always use AI when it helps, this has been part of our daily routine for years). But of course, I could be wrong, I'm here to learn.
3. Why don't you record more videos for Vemto and bring in more clients? - Recording videos for an introverted person, with poor diction and in a different language is a huge challenge for me. Added to this is the fact that, during all this time, I have been absurdly short of time and conditions to do so. However, I managed to record some and put them on the channel. In particular, the Filament video brought a lot of people to our website. Who knows in the future? This is a skill that I need to improve, but I have a huge list of priorities ahead.
4. Can I still buy a lifetime license? - No, the sale of licenses is temporarily disabled, and I have no idea when it will return.
5. Do you have a roadmap? - Not anymore, but what I hope for the future of Vemto can now be said in simple terms: a good schema editor, good code generation capabilities, and plugin support. Other features may emerge over time, but I have finally learned to focus.

Wrapping up

And that's it! It seems like I got a lot out of it and I feel lighter now.

I hope you understand everything that happened. I thank everyone I talked to, who supported me and encouraged me to continue on this journey.

Developing Vemto has made me grow a lot as a Software Engineer. It's been almost six years since the initial conception, and a software that seemed insurmountable now exists and is used by many people.

I don't want the project to die because of my inability to continue it.

So making it open source seems like the most natural path to take.

I appreciate your attention so far and I'm available to answer any questions. Just send me an email at [email protected]

Big hug!