Understanding Baserow's business model

• Our promises.
• The paid licenses: Baserow Premium, Advanced and Enterprise.
• Who should pay to create and maintain open-source projects?
• The proof is in the pudding.

Baserow is an open-source project, funded using an open-core business model. This means that on top of the functional, well-documented, open-source Baserow project, we offer extra premium features in a source-available add-on.

This model funds our company, mostly product development and user support, and ensures that we release new features at the pace expected by our community.

Our promises

To set out things as clearly as possible, here are the key things we promise as maintainers of the open-source Baserow project:

1. Any feature present in the free open-source Baserow project will always remain free and fully open source.
2. The main Baserow codebase will always remain free and open source.
3. The majority of new features made by Baserow will be open source.
4. You will always be able to self-host Baserow for free with no restrictions on storage, data, or usage.

We believe in open-source and see Baserow as an open-source project, with a paid offering targeting business users to fund our ongoing development and support.

The paid licenses: Baserow Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise

The paid Baserow plugin’s source code is available for everyone to view and vet in the same repository as our main codebase. Our main code-base is all licensed under the MIT License which allows you to modify it and use it commercially without having to re-share your modifications. The premium plugin is licensed under a proprietary license which can be seen here.

Who should pay to create and maintain open-source projects?

We believe in a fair and sustainable way of running an open-source project giving free access to most of our smaller users (solopreneurs, consumers, students, etc.) whilst providing value-added paid features for businesses to fund the Baserow team. We are putting this into practice with Baserow by offering paid features for the business market with direct support, whilst keeping the free product incredibly useful and unlimited for individual and smaller teams.

The proof is in the pudding

The graph below shows the amount of code we have written on the free open-source Baserow codebase compared to our premium add-on. As you can clearly see, we are focused massively on the core open-source version of Baserow and are releasing features for it at a much higher rate.

Our core free product is not an afterthought but our main focus.