(I'm a PostHog cofounder - we get about 35% of revenue from (2) and 65% from (3) below) There are three established ways to make money from open source if you'

(I'm a PostHog cofounder - we get about 35% of revenue from (2) and 65% from (3) below) There are three established ways to make money from open source if you're thinking about this.. my default recommendation would be the exact model Plausible uses today - (3) below, if you are just getting started and either bootstrapped or VC backed in today's funding environment. 1. paid support Advantages: (i) no need to build any extra features or set up hosting for your customers up front - low risk of wasting time in case you don't get product market fit with your paid product (ii) probably a good way to get close to users, as long as you don't end up over-fitting to 1 or 2 edge case use cases (who are, likely, those most likely to need paid support) - however, this will happen naturally if you set up a slack/discord community and you help people out for free Disadvantages: (i) you are no longer a builder, so you're not doing 100% leveraged work, so the margins are slimmer (ii) will take some time to get to revenue because you will need a reasonably popular project to get much demand (iii) this will be hard to fund if you want to do the VC route, there are exceptions though 2. extra, paid self-hosted features description: you have an open source project, and users can buy premium features on top for a fee of some kind Advantages: (i if you target enterprises who don't want to send data outside their environment who don't want to buy closed source SAAS products - they can try + buy much your product faster than your competition's Disadvantages: (i) it's hard to avoid customers expecting support managing the instance (just because they're paying you, even though you "just" sold extra features) (ii) you have to build a lot since you need an open source product and a paid product on top - so it needs a lot of investment to do this without hurting the open source project's value (I'd strongly recommend you get VC if you do this option, as you'll probably find bigger order values but slower sales cycles as well as all the building work) (iii) many people think everyone is moving to cloud, but we've seen there is a ton of underserved market here (more than enough to get to $100M+ revenue in our market at least), and increasing legislation around user privacy is keeping pressure on here 3. paid hosting of the project description: you have an open source project, and users can pay you to host it for them If you are bootstrapping or even VC backed in today's funding environment, I'd recommend defaulting to open source project _and_ a cloud hosted version as your paid version, unless there's a good reason not to. Advantages: (i) this is the fastest way to monetize (ii) for users without self hosting needs, this is likely a better user experience - less work to manage, so you may just grow a lot quicker initially Disadvantages: (i) you need to manage the hosted version (ii) at a product level, you are potentially competing head on with closed source SAAS