I wrote a piece on open source business models that you might find useful: http://blog.imranghory.org/open-source-business-models http://blog.imranghory.org/op

I wrote a piece on open source business models that you might find useful: http://blog.imranghory.org/open-source-business-models http://blog.imranghory.org/open-source-business-models The big risk with your suggested approach is that you have no defensibility as there's nothing stopping someone else offering a hosted version of your software. Because of this it's hard to maintain the high-margins typically required to grow a software businesses. Open sourcing your product also isn't going to magically make it more popular; unless there's strong reasons why a customer would prefer an open source version (i.e. if you're making infrastructure software which you're asking your customers to bet their business on) it's unlikely to have a significantly greater marketing impact than other freemium strategies. It sounds like what you really need is a go-to-market strategy. Most SaaS is sold through traditional online marketing (ads, seo, whitepapers, etc.) and sales and those are probably the main options you should be evaluating.