[penaazv]

Have you heard of Commercial open source (COSS)? It's a growing industry of promising OSS tools combining the benefits of proprietary SaaS with open source software.

As for the Calendly alternative instance - have you heard of cal.com? It's free for individuals.

I recently wrote this article featuring their origin story: <https://blog.scoutflo.com/cal-com-the-coolest-open-source-al...>

[reisr3]

No, I hadn't heard of COSS! Thanks for that - reading up on it now. Seems like exactly the framework I'm thinking about.

I love the Cal.com story. What gives me some pause is that they're VC-backed. $25M Series A. The free tier might be great, and I might come to rely upon it. But they're expected to produce an outsized ROI, and the traditional SaaS play is to give it away for free to capture the market and then raise prices. I'd much prefer a community-driven effort where we have no ROI expectations, so it can remain low-cost forever as we're just splitting overhead.

[Peer_Rich]

hey, peer here, cofounder of cal.com. We are quite fortunate to have a growing enterprise business that is subsidising the free plan.

we will never raise prices for the free plan, free stays free, especially since it's open source which means if we were to raise, it would compete with the self-hosted product and we really dont want that

rest assured, we are comfortable providing a free product with enterprise customers

[reisr3]

Awesome, thanks for explaining this. Reviewing cal.com today for my company - it seems like a great product.

[Kalpeshbhalekar]

I'll highly recommend Cal.com! Been using them for a while, huge advocates for it :)

[penaazv]

You're welcome! You can check this <https://cal.com/open> out to know more about the philosophy behind it.

You'll also find something called OSS Friends on this page - featuring more COSS startups in the ecosystem.