What does open source mean when you have to use a hosted solution and "premium" names cost 29 usd / month.
The AGPL won't save you from folks modifying/reselling your software. And if someone was non compliant, are you going to pay the lawyer fees to prove it?
I wish companies would stop using "open source" as a growth strategy.
AFAICT, their goal isn't to monopolize a hosting solution for their software, just to provide a path of minimal resistance to normal people using their software, and fund their lives along the way.
https://cal.com/about lays it out. Looks like they're a team of 15ish people who raised a Series A, but it seems they've gone about it in a pretty thoughtful way (15 years of runway, atm)
Expect the usual tension of open core shenanigans to eventually play out.
But yeah, in the long term I agree with you, it'll probably fall apart in the way you expect within 10 years. It's hard to outlast the financial interest of investors, even if they're you're friends.
They know what they're doing
It looks like there might be some funny business with MAU and Total Customers. MAU is only 3,500, but they somehow have 50k Total Customers? And they have a free tier? If only 7% of your paying customers use your product, they aren't going to renew. I expect that this doesn't include churn or is actually some kind of cumulative integral counting customer months or something.
[1] https://github.com/ssddanbrown/Open-Source-Confusers#calcom
Open source definitely isn’t a growth strategy for us. We’re huge open source fans, and do actually believe in what it stands for. We’re open source for a number of other reasons, such as longevity, privacy and genuine passion for OSS software (I’ve wrote more about this in other comments here).
However, yes, we are a company that is VC-backed, and so we have to make some decisions that are for the business side of things, and switching to AGPL is one way of cutting down on people trying to create rip off versions of our product.