
Mattermost raises $50M to advance its open source Slack alternative - ngaut
https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/19/mattermost-raises-50-million-to-advance-its-open-source-slack-alternative/
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ngaut
Github repo: [https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-
server](https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server)

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mdevere
Can someone explain to me how open source products can generate revenues like
this?

~~~
it33
Mattermost CEO here,

We looked at a lot of different models and ended up with a "buyer-based open
core" model.

The first "buyer" in this model is the user of our open source product that
doesn't cost any money, because it's open source.

It's typically a developer, or someone very close to a development team and
they self-host Mattermost as an open source Slack-alternative and get a lot of
value out of the product.

At some point the development team doesn't want to host Mattermost themselves
any more and asks the IT organization to host it in a data center or on a
private cloud.

The IT team is a different "buyer" who wants features that make the lives of
IT administration easier--account sync with AD/LDAP, SSO, eDiscovery, high
availability, etc.--and we have an enterprise edition for that buyer and offer
a fair price.

That's how we've been generating revenue so far.

