Ask HN: How to run a profitable open-source project?

Are you sure paying customers are only paying because of the pro features?

There's not enough info to make any assumption, but often times companies want the convenience of a cloud-hosted solution and/or want to pay for support/priority fixes if they go the self-hosted way.

What I'm trying to say is that at your stage managing a single codebase instead of 2 might be easier, and perhaps your paying customers will be exactly the same. You should validate/ask them.

why not build a youtube channel with a set of tutorial on how to build the features in the pro version from the fee version. That way if people can't afford the free version they can sit down and code the premium version with tutorials.

thank you for your help :)

Ask all users of your product to pay - in money, or their equivalent open source work effort. Check the rovas.app, which allows this and more.