About 4OTP and Weeblr

Hey, my name is Yannick. For the last 15 years, I have been running Weeblr, a small company dedicated to developing open-source software products. I hope you (will) like 4OTP.

In the mean time, here is a few more details about how it came about and who is making it.

Weeblr

We’ve been developing and supporting various pieces of software for the last 15 years, mostly SEO and content-related products for the Joomla and WordPress CMSes.

Our line of extensions, available at https://weeblr.com, now includes fully-featured SEO tools, a privacy oriented web analytics extension, an AI-based assistant, a video content manager and a podcast manager. All these products are open-source under the GPL license.

While it’s always hard to know who uses open-source software, our estimate based on downloads and support is that our software is or has been used on a minimum of 250,000 websites over the years.

4OTP

If I am an SEO and AI guy, how did 4OTP came about then?

Nothing out of the ordinary I guess: using a lot of online services, I found myself dealing with a lot of 2FA codes. As I did not want to use my password manager to store them, I was using Google Authenticator.

But quickly, using Google Authenticator (or other authenticator apps) with 30, 50 and more codes proved unpractical.

So I built my own 2FA codes app - much easier to use with many codes, and published it as 4OTP on the Play Store, only for a few friends to use privately.

Still, one - or rather two pieces were missing:

having a desktop app to avoid getting phone / unlocking / opening the app
and thus syncing between desktop and phone(s)

Which is why I doubled-down on 4OTP, developing the desktop (Windows and Mac) apps and the 4OTP Sync service.

Why a paid service?

There exists today a couple of alternatives to 4OTP, with free syncing service, but they depend on the company creating them making money on their other products.

I have seen this playbook before and would not want to rely on such business model, so I want 4OTP development and support to be independent of any other business.

Why not open-source?

Having been making a living for the last 15 years exclusively by “selling” open-source software (yes, I know, you don’t really sell GPL-licensed software), one would expect 4OTP to be open-source itself.

It is not, and the main reason is quite simple: that would require a fair bit of work in addition to the already large workload needed to develop and maintain versions of 4OTP for all platforms we support.

Why not Linux?

As much as I’d like to, this also comes down to resources and the ability to maintain and support Linux on top of the other platforms. So Linux is definitely a goal, just not a reality today.