[andris9]

This was my initial business model and it did not really work. As soon as there was the license key requirement, previously free users opted to the paid subscription to get the license key and get the upgrades. In fact all the old and free releases are still available under AGPL license from Github.

[bachmeier]

I suspect the reason this model works is because it's easy to say "We need X to do our work. It costs Y euros." and the company pays for it without thinking. It's probably a much tougher sell to say "We need to pay for this even though we can get it for free." Even harder is "We use this product so we should make a donation." It was never a matter of them wanting to avoid paying.

I see this all the time in universities. Underfunded open source projects won't get a $100 donation from a university using thousands of copies, but a company like Matlab can get massive payments just because that's the only way to get it. You have to figure out how to make it easy to justify paying for your software.

[notpushkin]

Yeah, it's a bummer. I'm trying to run an open source product, too [1] and that's one of my major concerns with this model.

One trick I want to try is, make everything open source but still paywall some features behind a license check. Easy to circumvent (and legal, too), but maybe businesses wouldn't be bothered with it, and for personal use – well, why not allow it – maybe some of them would convince their employers to use it as well :-) (And of course, providing it as a service is a much more straightforward business model, at least in my case.)

[1]: https://lunni.dev/