This strikes me as a poor choice (moreso than other BSL adopters) since there are many other error-handling SaaS companies available. It seems like it is better for people to be using your tool hosted by someone else than using a different tool with a different API so that migrating to your offering (hosting or support) is more difficult.
This would a great segway for another post as theres a ton of nuance and interesting history in how Sentry has approached the competitive market. I'll add to the list and maybe at some point do one just around that.
That said, almost all of our competitors plateaud in growth even _after_ we switched to the BUSL. We found folks don't care that much. They appreciate open source, but they care less about the caveats of a license and more than they can self-host, view the source. They care about the liability of the product being maintainable, and BUSL still allows you to maintain software if the company behind it went belly up.
Something also not easily understood: our SaaS business grew 4x faster than Open Source right off the bat, and eventually even faster. People absolutely desire to outsource problems that arent there core strength, but that's kind of what the industries been seeing all along with the rise of cloud providers and other SaaS services.
I know for a fact that your competition is using your code, even where they've built a differentiated service. e.g. Embrace is using Sentry Symbolicator. Having built my own symbolicator before yours existed, that's easily months of work that requires highly specialized knowledge. Like maybe a few dozen developers on the planet could write that.
I know you get a lot of flack over BUSL, but I'm not sure folks appreciate just how much of Sentry is open source and how much you're giving away, some of it of very high value almost exclusively to your competition. I mean who but a Sentry competitor would need your symbolicator? No one.
Fun fact: we acquired a company (specto) which used our open source symbolication infrastructure (underlying library to sumbolicator). Was a nice discovery.
More interesting would be what impact switching to BUSL had on your own business. Did growth accelerate after the switch? Was business declineing before the switch and did it pick back up afterwards? If there was a positive change in business growth trends, were there other thing the business did that may have accounted for the change?
I'll touch on it when we talk about relicensing, but the tl;dr is it didn't impact our business at all. It did however succeed at its goal of removing a nuisance (a story for a future post).
