I’ve always enjoyed listening to or reading about open-source projects that find a path to sustainability. This morning, I listened to a podcast (The Business of Open Source) about xWiki, an open-source knowledge management tool for companies. It got me thinking about how open-source businesses require constant reflection on their core purpose and value proposition.

At Tuist, we believe that the best way to build a productivity platform is through openness. Openness fosters accountability, which keeps us aligned with our mission and pushes us to deliver our best work because everything we do is out in the open. However, openness also presents a challenge: where do we create business value, and how do we monetize it to ensure we can continue doing what we love?

Years ago, Tuist’s value was primarily in its project generation feature, which we now consider a commodity—a gift to the community. Building on that foundation, we introduced optimizations like selective testing and binary caching, which span both the client and server. This marked an inflection point for the business, as server-side value opened up new revenue opportunities. We’ve discussed eventually open-sourcing the server as well, but in its current state—where hosting is simple by design (a necessity given our small team)—organizations might choose to self-host without seeing the value in supporting us financially.

There are interesting models to consider, such as the Fair Source Licenses, but this would distance us from a pure open-source model. Another option is dual licensing, like GitLab, where a community edition is extended with paid features. However, I have mixed feelings about this approach because it adds complexity to a product that’s already pioneering a new model in the ecosystem. For instance, Tuist started as a CLI tool, but now there’s a community server and potentially an enterprise server? It feels like too much.

My hope is that, eventually, the value will lie in hosting, maintaining, and scaling the business. At that point, we could even adopt a free software license for the server. Large enterprises often perceive self-hosting as a risk or too complex, making them more inclined to pay for a managed solution. For smaller companies and indie developers, we could offer the service for free up to a certain usage threshold and charge only when usage exceeds that limit. There will always be a group of users who prefer to self-host, and that’s fine—they contribute to improving the product and even help with marketing.

xWiki took the path of monetizing through support, but we are a product-oriented company. Our goal is to find a balanced SaaS solution that maximizes openness while ensuring sustainability. The exact model will evolve as we learn and adapt to shifting value propositions. What’s clear to us is that we want to continue contributing open-source tools to the ecosystem while presenting an alternative model for building sustainable open-source businesses.