Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I think there's a lot of "open core" stuff like Sentry, Tailscale (I think?), or Gitlab. Where "enough" of the house is given away in theory for you to do it yourself (but why would you do that?)

Metabase is another company I knew where they do this, but I don't know how successful they are (their hosting costs start at "way too high considering how easy the thing is to spin up", which was great for me at $PREV_JOB I suppose but)




Perhaps the business case is for "we want the Open Source product, but we're in a compliance-oriented business and need to have someone selling us a support and maintenance contract behind it."

I'd suspect the moment you touch anything with external auditing, it looks better to say "we've got a fully paid up support contract from the vendor" than "we're running v1.23.456-ubuntu-patch-357-with-chives-and-salsa that we downloaded last week."


I'm concerned about Metabase because of this. Amazing project, but the cloud offering doesn't seem to be enough.


> Sentry, Tailscale, or Gitlab

None of which are profitable




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: