Mattermost raises $50M to advance its open source Slack alternative

We looked at a lot of different models and ended up with a "buyer-based open core" model.

The first "buyer" in this model is the user of our open source product that doesn't cost any money, because it's open source.

It's typically a developer, or someone very close to a development team and they self-host Mattermost as an open source Slack-alternative and get a lot of value out of the product.

At some point the development team doesn't want to host Mattermost themselves any more and asks the IT organization to host it in a data center or on a private cloud.

The IT team is a different "buyer" who wants features that make the lives of IT administration easier--account sync with AD/LDAP, SSO, eDiscovery, high availability, etc.--and we have an enterprise edition for that buyer and offer a fair price.

That's how we've been generating revenue so far.