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Open source lets someone use your product without paying for it. It can be an amazing growth lever, but only if your business model can explain why paying for it makes sense regardless.

The question you need to be able to clearly answer is what becomes valuable enough to pay for once someone is using the software?

For some products, it’s hosting and operating it. For others, it’s controlling access, meeting compliance requirements, or getting timely support for any issues they might bump into. There’s no one size fits all.

TL;DR - the six models, and who each one is actually for:

• Open core - the individual adopts, then their company pays to govern.

• Managed cloud - you’re on call.

• Support and services - you sell expertise and an SLA.

• Commercial licensing - you sell different terms permitting specific use-cases

• Sponsorship - you ask someone to fund work everyone benefits from.

• Companion products - you sell a second thing to people who already love the first.

Often companies end up running two or three.

Open core: the individual adopts, the organisation pays

With open core, the base product is open source and customers pay for additional proprietary capabilities.

• GitLab: Premium and Ultimate capabilities for team workflows, security, and governance.

• Grafana: Enterprise data-source plugins, reporting, and additional access controls.

• Metabase: Advanced permissions, enterprise authentication, and embedded analytics capabilities.

The free product has to solve a complete problem for a user. They should be able to adopt it, use it seriously, and ideally recommend it to their peers.

Then when more people inside the company start using it additional requirements start to surface. Permissions. Approval workflows. Audit trail. SSO. Organisations have different requirements to end users.

The paid boundary is where your product gets useful enough that a team needs to govern it.

It’s a tricky balancing act to choose which features sit on which side. Paywall something people need for ordinary use and they’re less likely to try it. Give away everything a paying org needs and they’re less likely to pay.

I lived this at CloudBees. Our core commercial offer was Enterprise Jenkins, and over the years open source Jenkins plus the infrastructure layer around it (Kubernetes, mostly) steadily eroded the value we were charging for.

Beware though, moving the line is a one-way door. Adding new paid capabilities is easy. Making previously free capabilities paid is not.

Take MinIO. A release in May 2025 stripped the admin console out of the community edition.

The GitHub discussion that followed was titled “It’s not a feature issue, it’s a trust one”, and that diagnosis was correct. Users forked the console themselves, others packed up and moved to alternatives.

By December 2025 a co-founder had pushed a commit declaring maintenance mode, and the repo was archived in February 2026, briefly unarchived, then archived again in April. The README now points people at AIStor.

The lesson is to decide where the line goes before people build on the wrong side of it.

Managed cloud / hosting

With managed cloud, you run the software for the customer and charge for it.

• Supabase: A hosted backend with managed infrastructure and additional platform capabilities.

• Grafana Cloud: Managed observability services for metrics and visualisation.

• Temporal Cloud: A managed Temporal service, billed through plans and usage.

You can self-host Supabase, but then provisioning, updates, database maintenance, backups, recovery, and uptime become your responsibility. The documentation highlights the differences:

Installation is rarely the issue. But someone needs to be on the hook to own ongoing maintenance.

That ongoing responsibility is why databases, queues, and streaming systems suit this model so well. The work continues after setup, and typically becomes more demanding as usage grows. (which is a pretty convenient monetisation lever!)

If this feels like a relevant model, list the jobs the customer would otherwise have to do themselves. Then work out whether they want to pay you to take that responsibility off their hands.

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Support and services

Here you sell access to expertise and a defined commitment to help.

• Red Hat: Tested enterprise software, lifecycle maintenance, updates, and support.

• Percona: Specialist support for open-source databases, including MySQL and PostgreSQL.

• SQLite: Paid maintenance advice and priority support from SQLite’s developers.

Red Hat isn’t really selling software. It’s selling a credible answer to “how will this infrastructure be maintained over the next decade”, which is a question that keeps a particular kind of buyer awake at night.

The catch is, if every customer needs a bespoke engagement, growing revenue means adding more people.

Commercial licensing

Two different decisions tend to get bundled together here.

Dual licensing offers the software under alternative terms. A customer pays for a commercial licence when the open-source obligations don’t fit how they want to distribute or integrate it.

Source-available restrictions instead limit particular uses, typically running a competing hosted service.

One precondition. To sell commercial terms you need the right to relicense every line, which usually means a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) giving you permission to do so. Projects that took copyleft contributions without an agreement are stuck unless they can get everyone to agree after the fact.

• Qt: Open-source and commercial options (Paid terms for customers whose requirements don’t fit the applicable GPL/LGPL obligations.)

• MySQL: GPL and commercial licensing (Commercial terms for OEMs and vendors distributing proprietary products.)

• Confluent: Source-available terms for certain components (Restrictions on competing hosted offerings alongside paid enterprise products and cloud services.)

The devil is in the detail of course. Qt’s LGPL terms can permit closed applications when the requirements are met, so “closed product means you must pay” is too broad. Confluent’s restrictions apply to specific Confluent components; Apache Kafka remains Apache-licensed.

Who the restrictions are actually aimed at

Source-available terms show up in the same situation nearly every time. The project is infrastructure, a cloud provider is running it as a managed service at scale, and the company maintaining it sells a competing managed service. The licence is a wall around the hosting business.

MongoDB went first, in 2018. Confluent followed weeks later. Elastic changed its licence in early 2021, after years of fighting AWS over its hosted Elasticsearch service and the use of the name. Redis did the same in March 2024.

Each time, the same thing happened next. Someone forked the last open version and kept building it. AWS turned Elasticsearch into OpenSearch. Eight days after the Redis announcement, the Linux Foundation launched Valkey, with AWS, Google, Oracle, Ericsson and Snap behind it. HashiCorp got OpenTofu.

Both Elastic and Redis have since added an open source licence back alongside the restrictive ones. Elastic did it in 2024 and said the original change had worked. Redis did it in 2025, admitted it had damaged its relationship with the community, and also said the change had done its job.

OpenSearch and Valkey are both still going.

Elastic’s account and Redis’s account are both interesting spins reads.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship funds the continued work of a maintainer or project. Usually that’s in exchange for publicity in some form, but that’s rarely the driver. The real reason most companies sponsor OSS projects is that they depend on them, and so have a vested interest in ensuring their continued development and longevity.

• Vue.js: Individual and corporate sponsorship, with recognition benefits at different tiers.

• ESLint: Donations through Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors fund maintenance and development.

• webpack: Recurring backer and sponsor contributions, plus one-off donations.

The difficulty is converting widespread appreciation into recurring commitments.

GitHub tries to facilitate this:

Sponsorship asks someone inside a company to fund work that they depend on and benefit from. GitHub Sponsors and Open Collective handle the payment side, so the mechanics are easy enough.

It can build a revenue stream that keeps a project going, but it won’t scale into a business.

Paid companion products and extensions

A paid companion product gives people a separate purchase that becomes useful because they already use the free project. That might be deployment tooling, an administration interface, or a library of finished components.

• Laravel Nova: A commercial administration panel for Laravel applications.

• Tailwind Plus: Paid UI components, templates, and a UI kit from the Tailwind CSS team.

• SQLite Encryption Extension: A paid extension that adds encrypted database support to SQLite.

The good part is the range of companies it supports. A focused tool doesn’t need an enterprise sales team to justify its existence. And starting with a companion product doesn’t impose a ceiling: Laravel’s business attracted a $57 million investment from Accel 🚀

So which one is best for your project?

The best approach is to work out which problem your project creates or exposes, who specifically owns that problem, and whether that person has a budget.

Four questions that will help steer you:

1. Who’s responsible when it spreads? One developer installs it and nothing breaks. Twenty people use it and someone has to answer for who can access what. That someone is usually a platform lead or a security engineer, and they didn’t choose the tool. That’s who open core sells to.

2. Who’s on call? Backups, upgrades, scaling, security patches. If that work is constant and grows with usage, managed hosting and support start to make sense. If the only hard part is installing it, people will just install it. And if the endless work is yours rather than theirs, you’re looking at sponsorship.

3. Who does the licence block? Someone wants to ship your code in their product and their lawyer has said no. That’s a dual licensing deal, and it’s a small, specific group of buyers. Blocking competitors is a different thing and it doesn’t make anyone want to buy.

4. What do they need next? Your project works, and now they want an admin UI, or deployment tooling, or components they'd rather not build. That's a companion product. It works best when the thing they want was never going to live in the project anyway.

Whatever you land on, you need to be clear about who is buying, what problem they have, and why the FOSS version doesn’t already solve it.

And don’t forget, it probably has a shelf life. Our initial model at CloudBees got steadily eaten by upstream Jenkins and Kubernetes. MinIO’s answer eventually required taking something back that people already had which didn’t end well. The line you draw between free and paid isn’t a decision you make once, it’s something that needs monitoring and revisiting periodically.

Open source can get you adopted, but doesn’t get you paid. That part you have to design.

Book a free 1:1 consultation call with me - I keep a handful of slots open each week for founders and product growth leaders to explore working together and get some free advice along the way. Book a call.

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This is an extra newsletter issue to share something I’ve been working on as a side quest. Regular issue is dropping next week. But this is also a chance to share the updated newsletter aesthetic I’ve built - WDYT?

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GEEK OUT

Touch Grass

I'm sitting on the sofa. My laptop is open. My kids are somewhere nearby. I can hear them, which I'm telling myself counts for something. My wife is doing the thing where she's not saying anything about the laptop but also very clearly noticing the laptop. I've been at my desk since 7am. It's now 9pm. I moved from the office to the sofa about an hour ago, which in my head qualifies as "finishing work for the day."

It doesn't, obviously. I know it doesn't because I've done this before. The slow drift from "I'm just going to check one thing" to realising you've been absent from your own evening. Your own weekend. Your own life, in the ways that actually matter.

I swore I'd never let it happen again. And here I am, on my sofa, laptop open, doing exactly the same thing in a different costume.

This time the excuse isn't the same as before. This time it’s AI.

I want to be clear about something before this piece goes where it's going: the AI tools we have right now are extraordinary. I f✱king love them. Every day I’m amazed by some new unlock. So this isn’t a doom piece. I'm not here to tell you that AI is bad and you should go live in a cabin.

I'm a product and growth advisor and a founder building DevTune. Not long ago, the things we’re doing across the business, the coding, the go-to-market, the content, the infrastructure, would have required a sizeable team. Now we can move at a speed that would have seemed absurd even twelve months ago. I can prototype something in a morning that used to take a week. I can go from idea to working feature in a single sitting. I can research a market, draft positioning, build a landing page, and ship it before lunch.

I've been in tech long enough to have sat through several hype cycles, and this one is different. The productivity gains are real, and they're compounding. If you're a builder right now, a founder, a developer, someone who makes things, you can do work today at a cadence that simply wasn't possible just months ago.

I don't take that for granted. I'm pretty sure I'm comfortably in the 99th percentile of people experimenting with and leveraging these tools. I use AI across every part of my business, every day. Writing code with agentic coding tools. Running multi-agent workflows for research and GTM. Building open source tooling that pushes what these systems can do. The opportunities this all opens up as someone building a business in 2026 is honestly insane, and I feel fortunate to be living through it all.

So I need you to hold that in your head, that I believe all of this, deeply, while I tell you what it's costing me.

Here's the thing about having superpowers: you want to use them. All the time. There's always another experiment to run, another feature to build, another angle to explore. And because the tools are so good, the gap between "I wonder if..." and "let me just quickly..." is now near zero.

So you do. You try the thing. Again and again and again.

The FOMO is unlike anything I've experienced, and I've worked in tech for a long time. Every day on X, on LinkedIn, someone is shipping something extraordinary that they built in a weekend. Someone is sharing a workflow that makes yours look primitive. Someone is launching a product that sounds like the thing you were going to build next week. The rational part of your brain knows that most of this is noise, that you're already ahead of the curve, that no human being can absorb and act on everything. But the irrational part, the part that drives most founders, doesn't care about rational.

I'm writing this from the perspective of a founder, because that's the life I’m living as all this unfolds. But I've had enough conversations with PMs, marketers, and DevRel folks to know this isn't just a founder problem.

The tools don't care what your job title is.

If you're in tech and you build, ship, or create things, you're feeling some version of this.

That being said, for me, the FOMO isn't really about other people. It's about unrealised potential. The growth PM inside me can't stand the idea of leaving experiments unrun. Failing is fine. Failure is just learning. But failing because I didn't try everything I could have tried? That's one of the things that keeps me on the sofa with my laptop at 2am.

And underneath all of it, there's this feeling that I've struggled to name. It's not burnout. I'm not crashing. It's not overwhelm. I'm still functioning, still shipping, still moving forward. In fact I’m still buzzing about what’s possible. Still excited.

It's something more subtle. A low-grade hum of unease that never quite switches off. A bubbling level of stress that sits just below the surface. You're always edging it. Never quite tipping over, but never at rest either. And because you're still productive, still delivering, you don't flag it. You don't even give yourself permission to flag it. You just keep going.

That's not a healthy place to be. I know this. And yet….

I've lived this before. Different setting, same pattern.

For years I was in senior leadership and exec roles at companies like CloudBees and Snyk. I flew constantly. I was in a different city every week, usually a different country. Early flights, late dinners, hotel rooms that all looked the same. There was a buzz to it. Peak startup bubble. ‘High-performing teams’. Driving each other on, the energy of building something that mattered. I loved it, honestly. And I told myself, over and over, that I was doing it for my family. Building a career, earning well, providing. And there was some truth in that.

But there was also a version of events where my kids were growing up and I was somewhere else. Where bedtimes happened without me more often than with me. Where the small, unremarkable moments, the ones that only become important in hindsight, just quietly passed by while I was in an airport lounge telling myself it would all be worth it.

When I stepped away from that life, I made a promise to myself. I wouldn't let it happen again. I'd be present. I'd be there.

And now I am there. I work from home. I'm in the same building as my kids almost every day. And I'm doing the exact same thing.

The difference is that this time, the gap is pernicious. When you're travelling, the absence is obvious. You're not there. Everyone knows it, including you. But when you're on the sofa, laptop open, technically in the same room, you can tell yourself you're present. You're not. You're physically home and mentally somewhere else entirely. And honestly, that’s worse, because at least when I was flying to San Francisco, Boston, or Raleigh, nobody was pretending I was available.

The justification has changed, but squint and it’s the same pattern.

There's a cognitive cost to all of this that I don't think we talk about enough. The density of what I'm absorbing and producing on any given day is extraordinary. I'm context-switching between code, copy, strategy, infrastructure, customer conversations, open source projects, and the AI tools mean I can make meaningful progress on all of them in a single day. That sounds like a good thing, and in many ways it is. But my brain hasn't upgraded alongside the tooling. It's the same brain it's always been. Damn you AuDHD.

And that brings me to the title of this post and the phrase that won't leave my head: touch grass.

Internet slang for "you're too online, go outside." But beyond the dig, there's something important buried in it.

The literal version first. Getting outside, away from screens, into open air. It's a basic need that we've started treating as optional. I've kept a daily walk habit for the last couple of years. An hour ideally, at least thirty minutes. It's the time where I process things. Where the background threads in my head actually get to run. Where the half-formed idea from the morning becomes a clear thought by the afternoon. Where the stress settles, just enough, to let me think straight.

That habit has been gradually eroding. It seems to correlate pretty directly with how much more capable the tools have become. There's always one more thing to do before I head out. One more thing turns into three. The walk gets shorter, then gets pushed to later, then doesn't happen. And I don't notice until I've gone a week without proper time away from a screen and I feel like my head is full of static.

I don't think that's an accident. When the thing that keeps you sane is the first thing you sacrifice to the work, something has gone wrong. You're not processing anymore. You're just accumulating, and none of it is getting the space it needs to settle.

When I walk, things change in an important way: the hum quiets down. The constant noise I carry around all day, the half-finished thoughts, the next thing on the list, the background anxiety about everything I haven't done yet, it doesn't disappear, but it drops to a level where I can actually think and process.

We're not built to stare at screens for sixteen hours a day. We know this. Everyone knows this. And yet when the screens are showing us things we're excited about, things we're building, things that feel urgent and important, we act like the rules don't apply. But they do apply, even if your brain is pretending otherwise.

But touch grass means something beyond the literal, too. It means reconnecting with the things that make us human in ways that have nothing to do with output. Spending time with people you love, not while half-looking at your phone checking in on your background agents, but actually being there. Belonging. The kind you can't get from a Slack channel or a Twitter thread. Caring for people. Being cared for. The stuff you know matters but deprioritise anyway when the work feels important enough.

My kids are still young. Nine and seven. These years don't come back. I know this because I already lost some of them to the last version of this pattern. The exec version. And the fact that I can see myself doing it again, that I can catch myself on the sofa at 10pm, laptop open, kids in bed, wife quiet in a way that means something, that awareness has to count for something. But only if I actually do something with it.

I'd love to be able to wrap this up with a framework. Five steps to reclaiming your life from AI-powered productivity. A neat before-and-after. A morning routine that fixed everything.

I don't have that. (Sorry!)

What I have is awareness. I can see the pattern. I've seen it before, lived through it, come out the other side with enough regret to know I don't want to do it again. And I can see myself doing it again. That tension, between knowing better and doing the same thing anyway, is where I'm living right now.

So I’m writing this post partly as an accountability lever.

I'm going to get the walk back. Every day, an hour ideally, thirty minutes minimum. My head needs space and the walk is where I’ll find it.

I'm going to set clearer boundaries between work and home. That's hard when you work a lot from home and your brain never fully leaves the business. I'm negotiating this with myself, negotiating it with my family, and I don't have it fully figured out. I’m falling short of what I'd like. But that’s going to change.

I have to accept that I'm not going to run every experiment, ship every idea, explore every possibility. That some potential will go unrealised, and that has to be okay.

I think the most important thing, maybe the only thing I'm actually sure of, is that being conscious of this matters. Accepting that you're flawed, that this technology can push you into patterns you've seen before, that you're not immune just because you're aware. That's not a fix. But it's where fixing things starts.

So if any of this sounds familiar, if you're reading this on your phone on the sofa while your family is in the next room, maybe close the laptop tonight. Go for a walk tomorrow. Touch grass. Not because it fixes everything, but because you're a human being, and human beings need more than output.

You already know this. I already know this. The hard part is doing it.

BEFORE YOU GO

Book a free 1:1 consultation call with me - I keep a handful of slots open each week for founders and product growth leaders to explore working together and get some free advice along the way. Book a call.

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PS: Thanks again to our sponsor: Eleken

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I’m on a much needed family vacation in Greece 🇬🇷 this week, enjoying the consistently sunnier climate - a welcome break from the changeable weather we’ve had in the UK so far this summer.

So today’s post is a recap of my most popular posts of the year so far.

Let’s go!

GEEK LINKS

3 of the best growth reads from this week

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