Hello @diacritica,
thank you for sharing the current state. You’re not the first one to explore Open Core business model, so I want to take the opportunity to share some ideas I have come across in the past in the hope that it might help you shape your plan.
Back then I was participating on FOSDEM 2018 - Why I forked my own project and my own company
In case you haven’t heard about Nextcloud: It’s a fork of ownCloud. Frank Karlitschek founded it as Open Core project but eventually decided to start over.
He noticed that there was a conflict of interest: Some PRs had to be turned down because they were developed proprietary for paying customers.
I remember Frank once referred to Business models for open-source software - Wikipedia when deciding on how to match Open Source with a business model. I’m not quite sure whether it was the same talk, though.
In the end, technical support and consulting seem to be pretty solid options. I’m confident that you have earned your fair share of experience in this area as well.
The biggest risk with going Open Source and trying to earn money are cloud vendors taking the Open Source code and productising it. Happened to Elastic for example. Around the same time several projects switched the license. Business Source License appealed to some. Be aware, that it’s not an Open Source License anymore, so adopting it might loose some community members.
