Kaleidos Open Source, the company behind Penpot, has the resources and the team needed to do that. If Penpot really succeeds and demands more and more resources, a bigger team and a bigger infrastructure, we will need to find ways to monetize some aspects of Penpot. Many Open Source platforms have been very successful at that, without reverting to closing up the source code.
SaaS subscriptions offer a quite valid and straightforward business model on top of Open Source. We are also considering marketplace models à-la-Wordpress or big-enterprise-focused features for supported Penpot deployments à-la-Gitlab. No-bullshit Open Core models based on some iteration of a “Tax the rich” sound reasonable but we’re still unsure about what would make sense. At the moment, though, this is something we don’t plan to address until 2023.
If you would like to know more about our track record, just take a look at Taiga, our sister product, and its MPL 2.0 licensing model. It’s great to have first-hand experience.
