[madmax108]

As someone building something that's intended to be released as open-core, I disagree with this article. I've worked at and with B2B companies my entire life and specifically in that domain, there's a lot of "process-things" that are steamlined using a SaaS rather than by self-hosting. It's "much" easier to get a budget for a SaaS for $5 per user rather than have devops involved with setting up infra for a new service (and move around a hundred other priorities for them), and they'd happily say <non-trivial money> to have someone else send an invoice at end of the month for a service even if they can technically host it themselves with 90% of the core features.

Of course, there's other 'grey-pattern' techniques that open-core systems use (eg. the notorious https://sso.tax) that can also help build companies around but it's important to note that a small 10-100 person company has very different "app visibility/reporting/analytics" needs than a 1000 person corporate with multi-level hierarchies, and it's very much possible to build out a profitable company that builds a community with the 10-100 person startup via open source offerings that work perfectly for their use-cases while charging the companies that want something that "just works" for them for a lot of the advanced non-core stuff (and services).