For someone running a small business, money discipline is supposed to come "later, when things stabilise." The trouble is that things never stabilise.
A friend of mine runs a gym in Chennai. About a year ago he showed me his Excel sheet and admitted he had no idea if he was profitable. Tax time was a panic every year. He paid himself last, and often paid himself nothing. He had looked at Mindbody and Glofox, but they were priced for the US. The Indian alternatives he tried felt closed, and he did not trust them with his money data. So he was back on Excel.
That conversation stuck with me. India has roughly 50,000 small, owner-run gyms with the same problem, and the software market for them is either too expensive, proprietary with lock-in, or a spreadsheet. For a category that handles people's money, having nothing open or self-hostable felt off.
NetGainz is what I have built since then. It is a finance and operations platform for microgyms, released under AGPLv3, built on Frappe and ERPNext with a Next.js frontend. The product is opinionated around Profit First, Mike Michalowicz's small-business cash-flow method that flips the standard formula into Sales minus Profit equals Expenses.
In this talk I want to share what I have actually learned in a year, the parts I got wrong included. I started with the MIT license and switched to AGPLv3 a few months in, and there is a story there worth telling. I went with site-per-tenant over a shared database because for finance data the isolation matters more than the operational cost. I built the frontend as a separate Next.js app rather than staying with Frappe's Vue stack, and that had real tradeoffs both ways. The most surprising thing has been how quickly the technical decisions started shaping the business model, and the business decisions started shaping the code.
The wider point I want to make is that the same approach works for many other underserved Indian SMB verticals: yoga studios, music schools, tuition centres, small clinics, NGOs. I am calling the pattern FOSS for the Forgotten Middle. In the talk I will share how to pick a vertical and how to set up a project to invite contribution from day one.
The other reason I want to give this talk is to invite the IndiaFOSS community to contribute. If you have ever looked at a small-business problem in India and thought "someone should open-source this," this talk is for you. I will have good-first-issues labelled before the conference and the repo is at github.com/lokashche/netgainz.
