I’m assuming the difference is: “big $$ license fees” for on-prem is $X a year, while “sweet saas revenue” is $A a year, $B per user, $C for compute, $D for storage, and $E for requests.
As a large company, what are the things you are more than happy to pay for with on-prem?
The reason I’m asking: this feels like the largest issue with cloud saas, which is one of the more popular implementations of open-core for B2B. Not saying Splunk is open-core, but it’s related to above/dbt cloud discussion.
Enterprise customers have the highest propensity to pay, but don’t need or want their cloud offering.
Mid-tier customers actually prefer a managed service by their cloud provider, aws/gcp/azure, because it strikes a balance between easy AND it works within their vpc/iam/devops. But this cuts off open-core companies main revenue, so they start making ELv2 licenses (elastic, airbyte, etc) which makes things harder on mid-tier.
Small customers are the ones who love saas the most, but have the least ability to pay, have the least need for powerful tools, and will probably grow out of being a small customer…
I’m curious if there are any companies which are: source code available, commercial license, allow you to fork/modify the source code, only offer on-prem (no cloud saas offering), want the mega-clouds to offer a managed service. BUT the commercial license requires any companies over 250 employees or $X revenue (docker desktop style) to pay a yearly license fee.
We are fine on prem, pay big $$ license fees, but not enough. They want that sweet SaaS revenue.
I would be wary of pushing this, being a non-SaaS platform could be an advantage here.