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Comment by thedz | Hacker News Reader

As long as it remains open source, nothing prevents you from self-hosting, tho

You first try self-hosting but when things get serious, you usually switch to SaaS version of Sentry because maintaining an extra server and an application which you don't familiar with is not that easy. Open-source is actually a marketing strategy here. It makes the barrier for you to try the software is quite low which is extremely important for both startups and enterprise companies. Even some enterprise companies don't want to pay when they're evaluating your product.

If you don't want to pay, then host Sentry on your server, the company behind Sentry doesn't lose anything. In fact they can still benefit from you since you became a part of the community. These people usually advocate Sentry, report bugs etc.

I mean, thanks for describing how many open source companies make money?

It's relatively new in the industry to make money from open-source projects. There are enterprise companies such as Redhat but startups usually scared open-source because of your concerns. I admit that Sentry's approach is actually is bit risky because Sentry is easy to install and maintaining is not that hard unlike the other open-source startups that develop databases.

However you need to differentiate your product from your competitors and error-reporting is not actually quite a hard problem, I know many companies that still uses e-mails (send email with stack-trace directly from the app) for error-reporting. Sentry has a unique approach here, it's an advanced error-reporting tool and tries to build a community around Sentry with open-source.

If you're a developer who needs error-reporting for your new fancy app, instead of your custom solutions (which are actually workarounds) install Sentry easily and get an advanced error-reporting application for free. Eventually when you work in a enterprise or start a company, you will want to stick with Sentry since you're familiar with it and don't want to take the responsibility to host Sentry so you will switch to SaaS solution.

I'm not actually related with company behind Sentry, these are just my thoughts. :)

Which is why that's probably the first thing to go away.

Definitely not. We're an open source project and have no desires to change that.

Your investors might have desires to change that though.

I have been a participant to these discussions often enough so I'm quite aware of public perception on those topics :) I think we should be judged by our performance though and we are doing our very best to make sure that people like the product.

It would be crazy business to throw our biggest competitive advantage over board. It's not that we do not know why people use us :)

Honestly, I think you have the best UX and the best support team and the most compelling price. I just hope this remains the case in the future and I wish you all the best of luck.

I will be incredibly happy to be proven wrong on my fears.

I trust Armin given his excellent open source track record in the Python community. I will be using Sentry when I need to, solely because he works there :)

You're overstating how much power investors have at this stage of a company. During a seed, Series A, Series B etc. the entrepreneurs are often still in complete control and investors are mere advisors.

It is the companies that raise crazy amounts of capital over many rounds who end up at the whim of boards and investors.

Equity isn't where all the control comes from. Because they raised 9mil it's almost a sure thing they'll have to raise another round or go bust, so there's huge incentive to do what investors want.

We do not :)

Also, hi Nik, been awhile!

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