Charging for an Open Source product?
Hi, My name is Mark and I'm relatively new to the IH community. I've been working on my side project Flipt, (https://flipt.io), which is an on-prem feature flag solution (think Launch Darkly but run on your servers) for a couple years.
My eventual goal has always been to sell commercial licenses for Flipt to enterprise customers, as I think Flipt can help businesses release their software more gracefully and confidently to their end users, as well as experiment (A/B test) with features before fully releasing them.
The model I would like to follow is similar to that of Sidekiq (https://sidekiq.org/), a background processor job library for Ruby. Sidekiq is an open source project, that also offers Pro and Enterprise licenses for businesses. Along with support, the Pro and Enterprise versions also come with more features that businesses require.
I too want to keep Flipt open source for founders/anyone who wants to use it for the features that it has today. But, I also want to add enterprise features and sell a license/support for enterprise customers because I know that businesses can also get great value from using it.
My questions are:
- Do you think this is a realistic model to follow for Flipt?
- How should I go about positioning Flipt for enterprises and start charging for it?
- Do you know of any other products (non-SaaS) such as Sidekiq that have successfully maintained both an open source version and enterprise versions?
- Should I offer a SaaS version? The entire idea of Flipt was to keep it on-prem, because of latency, data privacy, etc., but I can also see the value in a SaaS solution for those that don't want to run it themselves.
Happy Holidays and thanks for any feedback you can give!
I'll be honest I always feel weird when money comes in the mix with open source. That's just my personal opinion though. Maybe it'll work for your product.
#4: You could potentially sell a hosted solution with priority support to businesses and enterprises. It's where e.g. Ghost's (https://ghost.org) main source of revenue is coming from. Spin up some servers, deploy your application there, take care of maintenance and uptime. If the business is still in charge of the database, that's good for privacy and latency too.
Licenses are so-so, the added features really need to pack a punch. Businesses tend to rather pay for something that saves them time.
I have free and open source Desktop project - https://jstock.org
What my monetization strategy is that, I develop another closed source Android mobile app, to complement the free desktop app - https://jstock.co
The closed source Android mobile app is monetized via advertising and subscription to remove ads model.
At the open source Desktop project website, I also include Google Adsense Ads as income supplement, although they are insignificant.
I'd say still have a "traditional" SaaS offering, for every company who does not want to bother managing an installation of it. The "more traditional way" of getting SaaS is to just using the software. If your product is good, those companies will use it.
Other companies who appreciate the benefits of open-source software more likely choosing your software over your competitor's and if you can provide support options for hosting it on their servers, that will be a huge bonus.
The open source route is simple: you charge for support and customisation.
Let your users do what they want with the software, heck even resell it. But you need to add something to the mix to monetise. Offer a support plan, and you can charge quite a lot for this, depending on your ability to actually support the on prem install.
About SaaS, yes!
Most organisation are becoming more concerned about their time spent maintaining infrastructures. Your SaaS solution would attract those, along with users who want to dip their toes in the water before committing with on prem.
Good luck.