As an engineer you're probably comfortable using the open source version indefinitely. However once a VP hears about free software being used they'll move quickly to make sure a few million dollars are spent so that everyone can act very serious about the software.<p>I'm half joking, but this is essentially the enterprise software sales model (or more likely you charge millions up front for bad software that isn't open source).<p>The less smarmy answer is so that companies have support contracts and someone to point at when things go wrong.
No incentive. Unlike other open source products we pay for like Mongo/Elastic, a managed version of Terraform or Consul doesn’t make much sense to use… we would only pay for support but even then there are a lot of docs online.