alt Hacker NewsThe open core model is fine, but your community edition should be a reasonably complete product. Gitlab is a good example of this. They're not selling access, they're selling convenience.
The features that differentiate to enterprise customers don't matter to small shops anyhow: policy compliance, monitoring, fancy reporting, fine grained access control,etc. Give away tools that are useful for individuals and small teams, and charge for the features that are large team/enterprise related.
You're naive if you think those don't affect small shops.
If you want to do enterprise software, even as a small shop, things like requiring pull request approvals is an absolute must.
Our customers demand it.
Doesn't matter how many employees we have, or how profitable we are. If we want to sell software to most large CPG companies, this stuff is non-negotiable.
So I just use GitHub.