Chapters · 2 min read
How we make money
The actual business model: a genuinely free, self-hostable core, and paid plans for the people who'd rather we run it for them.
A company that can't explain how it makes money is usually hiding something, so here it is plainly. Flagon is open source and self-hostable, and it always will be. We make money from the people who'd rather not run it themselves, and from teams big enough to need the things that only matter at scale. That's the whole model. The pricing philosophy, why it's cheap and stays cheap, gets its own page in priced below cost, on purpose; this one is about where the revenue actually comes from.
Open core, honestly drawn
The product is open source and you can run it yourself for free, forever. We charge for the hosted version, where we operate it for you, and for the capabilities a larger organization needs: scale, controls, the operational load you'd rather hand off.
The line between free and paid is the whole game, and we draw it honestly. The free thing has to be genuinely useful on its own, not a crippled demo engineered to push you into paying. If self-hosting Flagon solves your problem completely and you never pay us a cent, that's a success, not a loophole. We're betting that enough people, given a free option that actually works, will still choose to pay us to take the hosting off their hands.
Usage-based, and self-serve
You pay for what you use, and you can start, grow, and leave without talking to a salesperson. No annual contract you have to sign before you can try the thing, no "contact us for pricing," no quote that depends on how much they think you can afford. The price is public and the meter is honest.
Revenue from people glad to pay
The healthy kind of revenue comes from people who'd be a little sad if we vanished: they use the thing, get real value, and think the price is obviously fair. That's who the business is built around. It means we never have to trap anyone, because the people paying us are doing it on purpose and would do it again.
We'd rather make less per customer and keep far more of them, glad, than squeeze the ones we have until they resent it. A business that only holds customers because leaving hurts has already lost the argument on the merits.
Sustainable on purpose
This model only works if it keeps the lights on, and we take that seriously; the discipline behind it is in staying alive. But the point of being sustainable isn't to maximize what we extract. It's to never be so desperate that we're tempted to. A company that isn't worried about next month doesn't need to reach for the dark patterns, and that freedom is worth more to us than the margin we'd gain by using them. How that conviction turns into actual prices is the subject of priced below cost, on purpose.