Open Source Business Models: What Do Customers Pay For?
Compare paid hosting, support, and adjacent assets using Tailwind and Browserless, with clear distinctions between open source and source-available licenses.
An open source business needs a paid outcome that remains valuable when the code is available. Customers may pay for reliable hosting, implementation, support, additional commercial capabilities, or adjacent assets. The important question is what burden the buyer no longer has to carry.
Our position: start with that burden, then examine the license and delivery economics. GitHub attention is a distribution signal. It does not, by itself, establish a buyer, a recurring revenue stream, or permission to restrict someone else's use of the code.
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What can remain free while the business charges?
Keep the freely available software useful and charge for a separately understandable value proposition. Buyers should be able to explain what they receive beyond access to code they could already use.
The Open Source Initiative's FAQ explicitly permits commercial use and selling open source software. “Commercial” and “proprietary” are therefore different categories. A company can make money while honoring the rights granted by an open source license.
