This is the classic downside of open source that's supported by a "pro" edition: it encourages maintainers to actively avoid adding features that would compete with the paid product.
* https://www.nginx.com/press/nginx-carries-strong-business-mo...
1. Some of my smallest customers are actually lighthouse customers for the rest of their industry. When they can't afford a price-segmented "enterprise" feature then I miss out on their super valuable product feedback and word-of-mouth.
I've seen this pattern in sport, telecoms, public transport, k-12 education. About the only place I haven't seen it is the financial sector.
I have been both the customer missing out and the provider in this scenario.
2. If a large enterprise is prepared to buy many units, but won't use your high end features, they can just pay for the cheaper end unit. You likely just missed out on revenue. They may well have been interested in later adoption of your more sophisticated stuff, but because they bought the cheap product it'll never happen because at scale the cost step function of going up a tier is perceived super negatively. So you also miss out on feature adoption and product feedback.
I have only been the customer in this scenario. I have seen it in both the financial sector and government. It almost happens in healthcare, but they are easily manipulated into higher price segments by placing HIPAA compliance stuff there. NB: Personally I find that kind of manipulation to be toxically abhorrent and when I've been the customer used it as a red flag against doing business. Nonetheless it is common.
Overall-
To me, business strategy is all about the creation and capture of value. When you find a product model that creates a virtuous cycle between those two aspects of value, you likely have a winner.
The best example I can give validating my experience is AWS, where everyone can use everything on a pay-as-you-go basis. I have been both a customer and on the inside with AWS. The model is incredibly empowering for startups having access to this massive box of capability, and moreover enables enterprises to do long-term planning of feature adoption with price stability.
The only time I recommend charging more for an enterprise feature is because it costs you significantly more to deliver it and there is no other way to capture your share of the value created or use scale to drive down the marginal cost of delivery. A wise PM will want to separate that out into a separate product. A classic example is providing a TAM over and above your hopefully already universally excellent support desk.
The counter-example to this point of view might be Slack. I cannot fathom why they both tier their capabilities and then charge per seat. Hard to see how SSO and AD sync adds to marginal cost per customer seat, and the storage and uptime promises are similarly paper thin value adds. It is one of the reasons I never recommend them. Yet they are apparently successful, perhaps because their product is crack for dev teams.
So execution certainly still matters. And no doubt other counter-examples can be easily found. But if you want to maximise your market engagement, it is essential to know how your customers behave in the product selection process in response to the signals you give them.
Sorry that was more than one sentence. I was waiting for a compile.
I don't get why parent got down-voted. He is absolutely right. What's wrong with the confused downvoters?
AFAIK the Plus version is just not something people care about but its also never had any impact on the open source one. And as a strong advocate of open source I find it extremely annoying when users find reasons to complain about friendly models for monetization of such software. :/