Deep Research: OSS Business Models

I looked at 6 companies to validate whether Commune could bootstrap without VC. Plausible, Ghost, Cal.com, Supabase, Obsidian, and Gumroad. The pattern kept showing up. Give away tools on GitHub to build trust and stars. Sell convenience and privacy through hosting, sync, or premium features.

Plausible makes $3.1M with 4 people. AGPL core plus paid cloud hosting. Almost all revenue comes from cloud and basically nothing from self-hosted donations. That tells me paid hosting works when you position cloud as convenience and self-hosted as credibility.

Obsidian is most aligned with what I want Commune to be. $2M revenue with 18 people. Free app plus paid sync and publish services. Over 1,000 community plugins create this ecosystem moat where people can’t leave. Self-hosting becomes marketing, not the actual business model.

I pulled from 40+ web searches across founder interviews, blog posts, and revenue disclosures from 2024-2025. Focused only on companies that stayed profitable without VC pressure changing their trajectory. AGPL prevents forks from stealing your work. Both Plausible and Cal.com switched to AGPL v3 in 2024 specifically to stop cloud giants from taking without contributing back.

Ghost and Plausible both generate over 99% of revenue from managed hosting. Not from self-hosted users at all. Bootstrap is validated. $2-3M sustainable with small teams of 4-18 people. No need for VC if the product actually solves a real problem and distribution happens organically through Build in Public via GitHub stars and community.

Full Deep Research: Open Source Business Models Research: Developer Tools & Creator Platforms