Heya, Emma from the dev team here -

Totally hear you on the lack of progress and constantly changing timelines (it's not great 😬).

For a bit of context on where we are at, Hardcover is currently a small team of devs working in their spare time, outside of our regular 9 to 5s. We have our hands pretty full at the moment juggling bug fixes and new features.

One of the concerns we had about open sourcing in 2025 is that accepting contributions would require significant time investment from some our devs to stay on top of reviewing PRs, etc. Of course we would be super grateful for these contributions - but we wanted to make sure that the open source community has a good experience with Hardcover (like quick PR turnaround times), and we weren't sure we would be able to provide that with the limited capacity of the current team.

The next step we are looking to take in 2026 is to hire for a Developer Relations role so we are better equipped to go open source. You can see that job listing on our Open Roles page here https://hardcover.app/pages/roles

I hope to see you back when we do go open source!

I appreciate the effort, but the status change from “in progress” to “planned”, combined with the lack of concrete progress since 2024 and the slipped targets mentioned in the Oct 2025 report, has worn out my confidence.

I’m going to give up on Hardcover for now and keep using the existing proprietary platforms rather than wait indefinitely. At least there the expectations are clear ("choose your master", as Stallman put it).

If the project genuinely becomes open source (OSI-approved, e.g., GPLv3), I’d reconsider - and would still be happy to support it financially, as mentioned a year ago.

Super excited for this!!!

Hi everyone - update on this one - if you missed Adam's October Report unfortunately we hit some roadblocks around open sourcing Hardcover (scroll down to the "Source Available to Open Source" section in the blog for more details).

We can't provide a new timeline just yet, but Adam is looking into figuring out the work remaining 👍

Look forward to support with bug fix and features, too

Hey everyone - I know it's been a long while that this feature request has been "in progress" but open-sourcing Hardcover is currently Adam's top-priority, so rest assured we are on it 🙏

Bro you are doing great job!!!

I would be willing to support a free and open-source Hardcover because in that case, even if the platform failed, the code itself wouldn't simply vanish. Others could learn from it, build upon it, or even fork it. My investment would then contribute to a lasting, tangible resource. Furthermore, freeing and opening the source code would foster a community around the platform, increasing transparency and potentially leading to valuable contributions. It aligns with the open knowledge ideals many of us appreciate.
I will definitely not put money into yet another non-free and closed source platform; effort, maybe. Money, never.

Is there any updates on this ? I am curious to know how far have you got 😊

I am so pumped for this!

We have a dozen or so things to complete before this is done. Making progress!

Yay! Excited to have the opportunity to contribute (assuming I’m decent at React by the time it’s open sourced)!

Please Open source it all. API and all. The rationale behind this is I’m interested in making an epub reader and would love for it to automatically update my progress. Also while the website is great the iOS app needs work. It’s slow when moving from one screen to another sometimes asks for re-authentication when logging in it will notify that it’s already logged in I can tell this is NOT a native app possible react native or some such

We absolutely want to do this before the end of 2024!

This is one we're heavily considering. We might end up open sourcing only the front-end but keeping the API private. One of the difficult parts is the data to work with it locally. We think that could work by having a staging API that people work with locally that has removed all private information (private notes, non-publicly saved books).

We'd very much like to make this public and allow people to submit pull requests. If anyone would be interested in being an early beta tester of this let us know. When/if we do this we'd like to do it right, and that means having a great initial experience.