Hi, I'm Dayyan - Here's why I build Spwig

[dayyanj]

I run CocosBotanica, a small online store. Before Spwig existed, I was running it on WooCommerce, and my daughter ran the NZ version on Shopify. Both were costing more than the store was earning.

WooCommerce was slow because I needed a stack of plugins just to get the look and feel I wanted, and plugin updates kept breaking things. Shopify was more predictable but the monthly fees add up quickly when traffic is modest. My store doesn't get much traffic. I expect most independent stores don't. So the running costs and admin overhead started to feel disproportionate to the outcome.

I looked at the options: migrate to yet another SaaS, keep patching the WooCommerce install, or build something lightweight of my own. All three had costs, money, time, or risk of the "new thing" being just as bad.

At some point I thought: if I'm going to build my own store platform, why not build one anyone could use? One that tackles the specific pain points I've been hitting, slow storefronts, plugin fragility, per-transaction fees, data trapped in someone else's account. One built by a merchant, for merchants, with modern aesthetics and speed at the centre from day one.

That was over a year ago. Spwig is what came out of it.

The reason it's now open source is more honest than a lot of "we always intended to be OSS" stories: breaking into the crowded e-commerce market as a paid product would have needed a much bigger runway than I was willing to commit to personally. Rather than let a year's work sit idle, I've open-sourced the whole platform under AGPL v3 and I'll earn a living from hosting, support, and the ecosystem around it.

If you're a merchant tired of paying for infrastructure that doesn't respect your data or your margins, Spwig is for you. If you're a developer who wants a full-featured Django e-commerce codebase to hack on, it's for you too.

Fair warning on cadence: I'm building Spwig alongside many other projects, so my responses here won't be measured in hours, more like days. The Discussions community will often be faster than me. If you're comfortable with that pace, welcome.

Introduce yourself in the replies. I'd love to know how you found the project and what you're working on.

— Dayyan James