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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, but that read is a bit cynical

Is it? I've found that all open core projects I've used over time gradually lock more and more features away with each update and usually end up being more expensive than the closed source alternative.

The latest example is RocketChat which a year ago had a couple of features and one or two gentle reminders to upgrade to enterprise, but now it's getting really naggy. And when I did contact them for enterprise pricing, which is not clearly available, it ended up being way more than we could pay and a lot more than Slack (can't remember exactly now but something like $10/user if we included the bridges to WhatsApp and Messenger).

Can you give any counterexamples of popular, growing open core projects that don't lock away more features over time?

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> The latest example is RocketChat which a year ago had a couple of features and one or two gentle reminders to upgrade to enterprise, but now it's getting really naggy. And when I did contact them for enterprise pricing, which is not clearly available, it ended up being way more than we could pay and a lot more than Slack (can't remember exactly now but something like $10/user if we included the bridges to WhatsApp and Messenger).

We had exact same experience with Mattermost. We needed only LDAP auth from enterprise side but it was good product so we were fine paying iirc $2.5/mo/user for it. They doubled the price ("we add more features that you don't use to this level, so pay us more"), we got pissed and our dev just whipped github-like auth page (OC version allows authenticating with gitlab) and we pointed it to that.

Now I see they doubled it again and at $10, when our O365 accounts cost $6.50/mo it would be impossible sell

Redis is technically open core, with Redis Enterprise supposedly gating 'simple' scaling, multi-tenancy, and a (I assume) plug-and-play k8s integration https://redis.io/docs/about/redis-enterprise/

I think OSS have kind of problem with "too good" software.

If your business is produce software and work as consulting company for it, software that is very good and easy to use is actively reducing your market, because frankly people don't need any help to use it.

Take ES for example. Running big-ish cluster isn't that hard with a bit of googling and experimenting, so there is little reason to ever bother with support contract.

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