PostgreSQL has a number of companies providing support, the db is free and open source. Ray is offered for free, Anyscale provides support. Quansight offers qhub for free and provides support. Those are just a few off the top of my head. Disclaimer: I work at Quansight and contribute to ray.
Anyscale seems to follow the paid hosting (open source product + paid in-house SaaS offering) strategy though? Similarly the majority of the companies listed at https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/ either provide paid hosting or some version of open core (proprietary add-ons/tools) in addition to support, or else seem to be general DB consultancies that include Postgres as one of their supported products, although it does look like there are a few small teams that focus exclusively on Postgres consulting.
Quansight is a fascinating example! Are you allowed to share roughly what ratio of revenue comes from the support side and what ratio comes from the venture fund?
I don’t really know, sorry. There are a lot of moving pieces as the company grows (we are hiring) and the interplay between the pure consulting, open source work, growing the Venture fund is dynamic.
What's wrong with paid hosting? For the people who do pay for software (essentially commercial entities), the management and support are as important (if not more) than the software itself.
The code being open-source is actually a great advantage because it alleviates concerns around lock-in and vendor going under (If e.g. AWS's RDS is for some reason no longer available to us, I can still run Postgresql myself, at least until I find an alternative).
Oh nothing wrong. I'm just on a fact-finding mission on seeing whether any other companies have successfully followed the consulting/support contract model vs paid hosting or open core (because this has rather significant repercussions on what kind of products lend themselves well to a given business model, e.g. a desktop app is not going to work well for paid hosting).
