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Khoury alum Ben Senescu wants to make open-source software you can actually use
“Lots of open-source apps exist, but they aren’t easy to host yourself," Ben Senescu says. “The vision is to have an app store where you can have open-source free versions of every software.”
Open source offers a compelling vision. In an era where more and more proprietary software is offered as a monthly service with ever-increasing fees, software with freely available source code — which users can copy, run, learn from, or build on as they see fit — is a fairly utopian pitch. So why don’t more people use open-source alternatives?
Because without a platform to host the app and an interface to interact with it, implementing open-source alternatives can range from annoying to impossible, says Khoury alumnus Ben Senescu. That’s why he’s building EveryApp, a platform to develop and self-host open-source applications and ensure open source is a genuinely viable alternative.
Right after Senescu started working on EveryApp in the fall of 2025, he encountered an ideal use case. He wanted EveryApp to be shown by Google to potential users, so he needed a tool to help him understand what people were searching for and boost his website’s search engine optimization (SEO).
“Every tool was $120, $150 a month,” he said. “If you’re someone like me who’s just starting out, you aren’t going to get $150 of value a month out of those tools.”
Instead, Senescu wanted to use a free open-source alternative. He found a provider that had the SEO data he needed, charged a usage-based fee to access the data, and even offered an open-source API. But he still needed a way to host and interface with the data before he could use it to search-optimize his website.
So Senescu turned to the platform he was building to solve his problem. Through EveryApp, he used coding agents to quickly draft his user interface then self-hosted it on Cloudflare. Within days, he’d built the initial version of OpenSEO to help him start to improve EveryApp’s ranking for search engines.
Senescu is currently a one-man team, so in theory, he could have hosted his UI on his own device. But the benefit of EveryApp becomes even clearer when many members of a team on different devices are trying to work with the same piece of open-source software. EveryApp handles hosting, deployment, authentication, user management, database setup — all the parts of multi-device deployment that are, in Senescu’s words, “scary for non-technical people, and annoying for technical people.”
“People in the SEO community seem very excited,” said Senescu. “I want to make it the best SEO tool so people can see what the ceiling is on open source.”
Businesspeople who want to avoid renting proprietary software-as-a-service apps are one of Senescu’s target audiences; the other is everyday consumers. EveryApp’s deployable examples — a workout tracker, to-do application, and cooking assistant — are designed to reach this second group.
“Lots of open-source apps already exist. The code is open source but they aren’t easy to actually host yourself. The assumption is that you’re going to pay the company to host it for you,” he said. “The vision is to have an app store where you can have open-source free versions of every software … It’ll be a magical website, where you click a button and you can use all these services for free.”
Senescu has long been interested in what he can build outside of the established tech ecosystem and is grateful for the support he received to explore that passion at Northeastern. He took part in the Husky Startup Challenge during his second year and worked with Northeastern’s venture accelerator, IDEA. The product that began at IDEA — a platform to connect musicians directly to their fans — eventually became his self-developed second co-op, in partnership with two other students.
READ: Undergrad Ben Senescu and co-founders launch new app for musical artists
“Northeastern has a great startup mentality and ecosystem,” said Senescu. “I really learned how to figure things out.”
After graduating with his degree in computer science in 2021, he spent a few years at Boston-based startups like Klaviyo and Patrol, getting a handle on how an idea goes from prototype to product. But he never lost his passion to see what he could build, and in November 2025, he turned his attention to EveryApp full-time.
As EveryApp continues to develop, Senescu’s dream is that the new platform will not just be a technology, but also a community. He hosts a Discord server for developers using EveryApp and notes that the project is still in an early enough stage that if community members ask technical questions there, the answers will come from Senescu himself. He is particularly hopeful that students will get involved.
“A lot of students — or at least, me — struggled with the question, ‘What should I build for a project?’ I think EveryApp is a really cool way to make something that’s different,” he said. “There are lots of workout tracking apps, but with EveryApp you can make something people can easily install and use. And it’s within this ecosystem. You can learn to use Cloudflare; you can learn new modern tooling. If you get stuck, you have access to the whole community for help.”
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