Business model

PostHog is a for profit company that balances the need to improve the open source code of PostHog with the need to add paid features, or PostHog Cloud, in order to generate income.

We have an open core and cloud business model.

Why do we work on the open source product?

When we work on the open source product, it increases the community size, which means we end up with more features, and thus a better product. This means we get yet more community growth and it also helps with revenue growth since the paid products will also improve.

Promises

1. We won't introduce features into the open source codebase with a delay.
2. We will always release and open source all tests we have for an open source feature.
3. The open source codebase will never contain arbitrary limits (i.e. event volumes, user numbers).
4. The majority of features made by PostHog will remain open source.
5. The product will always be available for download without leaving an email address or logging in.
6. We will always allow you to benchmark PostHog.

What features are paid only?

When PostHog (or a contributor - feel free to message us in advance) makes a new feature, we ask ourselves two questions:

1. Is this feature for Creation, Collaboration or Compliance?
2. Would this feature help more users find and use PostHog?

Creation, Collaboration or Compliance**

By default, we launch new things as paid. Then we quickly figure out if we can open source them. We consider it an irreversible decision to "un-open source" something, hence this way of releasing. We aim to promptly convert new features to open source if they are suitable.

• Creation: if the feature improves our existing open source products and is focused on helping individual contributors then it will be open source. If it's a major new feature or product line it should default to being a paid feature.
• Collaboration: if the feature helps teams to collaborate on Posthog it should be a paid feature. The exception to this is if the feature will significantly help the community to increase. For example, initially we planned "multiple users" as a feature for the source-available version. However, we decided that having multiple users would help the community to grow, which benefits everyone disproportionately.
• Compliance: if the feature is disproportionately used by enterprises for compliance it should be an enterprise feature.

How does open source benefit from our paid offerings?

The paid features can increase our revenue, thus our ability to grow and hire more developers, who we will use on both versions of the product.

1. PostHog contributes many new features to the open source version. Having a viable business model makes it easier for us to invest more here.
2. Security fixes.
3. Support until the community can self sustain itself.
4. Performance improvements.
5. Running an upgrade server.