[uncheckederror]

Open source property tax assessment, admin, and collection software. This space is foundational to the function of local government, but the existing closed-source offerings in this space are expensive, dated, and opaque to the public.

This will never be VC backable because the market is small and each local government has special needs and unique requirements. The cost per customer is high and there's a hard cap on the TAM.

[ciarannolan]

Do you mind if I ask how you know about this? Is it an industry you work in/around?

I'm always curious how people discover these kinds of business ideas.

[uncheckederror]

In a prior job I was tasked with building a REST API client for a closed source vendor product in this space as part of project to replace an existing system. Data need to be captured from a dozen on-prem databases that supported other vendor applications and then pushed into this new system using the client I built.

Sadly, the vendor provided scanned copies of JIRA user-stories as documentation of their app's API. Despite much struggling, the vendor wouldn't implement even the most basic auto-generated documentation for their API (Swagger). Bugs filed against their product regularly had a 3 month turn around time.

If there were an open source product in this space I could have forked it, made the changes I needed, submitted a pull request and then escalated it with management to get it mainlined by the vendor.

We were their only client for this product and they needed us to implement their system as an example of success so they could make further sales. But their secrecy made good-faith efforts at building integrations with their product extremely difficult. This might have been survivable if the vendor was good at communicating.

Alas this project just got delayed for another year after it was discovered by one of my old coworkers that the new system wasn't calculating property taxes correctly. If we had taken the vendor at their word this would have not been discovered and incorrect taxes may have gone out. Nobody loves taxes, but people rightfully hate it when their local government makes preventable mistakes.

Open source software in this space would reduce the rate of errors made in these scenarios and allow the public to verify the correctness of the system that taxes their property. As a bonus the cost of developing these systems could be spread across multiple local governments who each employ their own developers, rather than each group struggling through this process on their own once a decade.

[blueblisters]

I wonder how open source software would be received by local governments. The conditions of government contracts often provide for guarantees/penalties for the delivered software. Moreover, the barriers of entry are typically high, the bidder needs to have x years of "prior experience" with crazy compliance and insurance requirements.