There is a google sheet which has the data I used for this post [0].<p>I had also looked at companies like Slack and Zoom which target lower average deal sizes and it was quite remarkable how much better their metrics were. But didn't feel like it was apples to apples. That data is the spreadsheet though.<p>[0] <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BV1Kk542KHultHOB8LkzAotv1L5PvCb87_mrNMO43JI/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BV1Kk542KHultHOB8Lkz...</a>
We buy support.
I dislike Open Core as it tends to be unclear where features go in the future, and the pricing is usually insane.
At my workplace we need to be on-prem so SaaS is out.
We often pay for support we don't really need, in order to fund open source projects.
I think in the article SaaS is used to refer to proprietary SaaS companies.<p>In my opinion these are two different dimensions. You have the delivery method: SaaS vs. self-managed/on-premises. And you have the license of the code: proprietary vs. open-core (which can be fully open source, open-core, or a non-compete license like the one MongoDB and CockroachDB switched to).<p>At GitLab we have an open-core license and offer the product both as SaaS and self-managed, so we do both things in the title. The opposite would be companies offering only proprietary software that you run yourself, like Sketch.<p>Another dimension would be billing, people frequently mention SaaS as an example of subscription billing. At Gitlab we also bill for our self-managed software on a subscription basis instead of a big license fee upfront and yearly maintenance.
> In the second post, we discussed how there is actually quite a bit of overlap between SaaS and Open Core and to draw a distinction, we would assume the Open Core software is primarily being delivered on-premises for comparison purposes.<p>Hmm, that might be convenient for your analysis, but it seems an unsafe assumption and artificial categorization to me. I think an increasing number of "open core" efforts, possibly most of them, are trying to monetize the non-open-source portions via SaaS. In fact, as we saw in the Amazon/ElasticSearch fight, one of the main motivations for not using a FLOSS license for some or all of your software is to prevent SaaS competitors from using the software you are producing.<p>I tried to look at your list of companies analyzed categorized "Open Core" to see how many of them offer a SaaS, but I realized that for these companies I was unfamiliar with it was hard to figure that out quickly from their web pages. Let alone then figure out if they were <i>primarily</i> delivering as SaaS if they offered an on-premises option (as even Github does). But that would seem to be neccessary to validate your assumptions.
I've been working on an open source search engine (<a href="https://github.com/typesense/typesense" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/typesense/typesense</a>) and this exact deliberation has been on my mind.<p>Ideally, one could offer both on-premise and hosted versions (like Gitlab), but that's really tricky and needs a lot of resources to pull off successfully.
This question (or the basis of the analysis) really doesn't make a ton of sense. The overriding deciding factor is really: who is the buyer and how do they want to buy. An open-core model for a strictly non-technical audience is a lot worse off than SaaS. On the other hand, if you have customers with security concerns SaaS may be off the table (still) for many of them.
I'm really curious how bootstrapping as opposed to VC money would affect this comparison. Not really much in the way of data I imagine though... I suppose it's hard to compare too. Big piece of a small pie vs small piece of a big pie kind of issues abound. Although HN has a very reasonable slant towards VC backed startups, I'm <i>much</i> more interested in bootstrapped startups.