Why we’re betting on AGPL Open-Core (and why our MRR is $0)

There it is. The glorious $0 MRR dashboard.

For the past few months, my team and I have been architecting NextBlock CMS—a full-stack, high-performance alternative to WordPress built natively on Next.js 16 and Supabase.

We got tired of the "Frankenstein" setups required by decoupled headless CMSs, so we built a unified system with a Notion-style Tiptap block editor that hits 100/100 Lighthouse scores by default.

But as we approached our launch, we hit the hardest decision every dev-tool founder faces: How do we actually monetize this without being evil?

We decided to go all-in on an AGPL Open-Core model.

The "Free" Core
The core CMS is 100% open-source under AGPL. If you want to build a blazing-fast blog or marketing site, it’s completely free. No SaaS lock-in, no usage limits. You own your data and your code.

What We Are Gating (The Premium Packages)
To make this a sustainable business, we drew a line in the sand: If a feature directly helps you generate revenue or replaces an expensive SaaS tool, it goes behind a premium license key.

We are gating two specific packages:

1. Premium E-Commerce: Native Stripe (physical goods with auto-tax sync) and Freemius (digital licenses) integrations. It includes multi-currency routing out of the box.
2. Cortex AI: A native agent layer. We use constrained decoding to force AI to output strict JSONB blocks (zero HTML sanitization lag). We also use a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) architecture via OpenRouter so we don't have to mark up API costs.

The Ask: I need your pricing feedback
We are currently in Open Beta (hence the $0 MRR), but as we look toward launching the NextBlock Store, I’m wrestling with the pricing model.

Does the "AGPL Core + Paid Integrations" model feel like a fair trade-off to you as a developer?

For the AI package, does a BYOK model feel better than paying a monthly subscription for an "AI Wrapper"?

How would you price a lifetime vs. yearly license for the E-commerce package?

If you want to see how the architecture actually feels before giving feedback, our public sandbox is officially open for "breaker" testing at https://cms.nextblock.dev (it wipes the database every day, so go crazy).

Would love to hear how other open-source/dev-tool founders have navigated this!