
Ask HN: What's a good business model for a product like Keybase - niyikiza
What are some ways a company providing services like Keybase can sustain itself and have a healthy business model.
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m52go
Open-core, or fully open-source with paid offerings (e.g. Zulip -- see
tabbott's comment below [0]).

Let the DIYers host their own instances, but offer support and/or on-premise
deployments for a fee. It seems to be what Mattermost, Zulip, and others are
doing with some success.

Mattermost also includes use of their mobile notification relay servers in
their paid offerings, which is compelling, because otherwise you have to build
_and distribute_ your own mobile apps.

[0] edited to include reference to important comment

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tabbott
Just to be clear, Zulip is not Open Core. We are 100% open source software, in
contrast with Mattermost, GitLab, and many (most?) other VC-funded
applications marketed as "open source".

I think this is a really important distinction; the VC-funded open core
business model has a fundamental incentive structure that pushes the company
to makes its open source project an intentionally crippled demo product so
that they don't miss any revenue they might have had as a proprietary product.

~~~
m52go
Thanks for clarifying -- I've edited my comment to make that more clear. And
thanks for your work on Zulip!

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jamieweb
Free for personal and small team use to gain brand and product awareness, then
charge for support, additional features, higher usage limits, etc.

Basically the same as Slack, Trello, etc.

Be careful with per-user billing though, as this puts a lot of big enterprises
off.

