| I really dislike how open source has evolved over the last decade. A lot of open source isn't much more than a feature anemic demo and IMO is only there so companies can generate sales leads. Getting good quality bug reports or contributions from the "community" members (aka suckers) are a bonus. I don't contribute to projects that have stripped down, almost unusable versions for their open source variant and that's most of them. Years ago I saw someone on HN say something like "charge for features or scale, not both." Personally I think that should be "charge for scale, not features." I like the way Drone.io has done their licensing so far, even after being bought by Harness. Before, it was something like "do what you want if you have less than $1 million in revenue." Now, with Harness.io it appears they've settled on charging for scale. When I looked at their pricing a couple days ago it says the "free" (open source) version is limited to 1 server. I'm not sure how that works (or how they enforce it), but the main thing IMO is they don't appear to limit features. I can actually use it without reading their feature tiers like it's an API that changes every time the marketing department waffles on the pricing. I think the current models for pricing SaaS suck and Harness is closer to a model that makes sense. For me, the reality is that I only want 2 tiers; free where I self host and SaaS where I pay someone to do it. The problem is they always want to charge enterprises more per user which makes sense since it's harder to scale and support to the level needed. IMO, just have 2 tiers; free, self-hosted with full features and community support and paid, but with a different pricing model that's based on user count and support. For example, give the first user for free with community support. You always keep the price for lower tier users. Give the next 4 users for a low cost with email support. Give the next 20 ish users for a mid-tier cost with phone support. Make the remaining users the price you actually want with priority support. That brings the cost average down for small users and makes it much more attractive to adopt a product. The pricing curve looks more like a camels hump (assuming you negotiate if you're huge) instead of a staircase (like GitLab) where you hit pricing cliffs that are tough to swallow. |