Pricing the Open Source Software, Vol 2

This is the second volume of a running project. The first was a series of pricing teardowns on my personal Substack — read a tool’s pricing page line by line, read its license more carefully, decide whether the paid tier is worth it. Two years later I rebuilt the series on the Beton blog, re-verified every current number against the live pricing pages, and pulled the 2023 figures from the Wayback Machine so the comparison is real, not remembered.

This post analyzes what changed across all 20 teardowns. Eight of them have a 2023 baseline; the rest are new to this volume. The raw data — every number with its source — is public on GitHub.

The license is now a sales tool

Permissive MIT is still the most common license, but strong copyleft is right behind it. Seven of the twenty ship under AGPL-3.0 — a license that lets anyone read, run, and modify the code, but forces any networked modification to be open-sourced too. That clause makes it legally awkward for a cloud provider to take the project, host it, and resell it without contributing back. AGPL is the open-source answer to “what stops AWS from eating us.”

The MIT count also overstates how open these tools really are. PostHog, Infisical, Chatwoot, and others put their core under MIT, then keep enterprise features — SSO, RBAC, audit logs — in a separate directory under a commercial license. The code is open. The features a company needs at scale are not. That open-core split is the dominant monetization pattern in the set.

From seats to usage

The clearest structural change is metering. Usage-based pricing — pay per event, per GB, per run, per credit — used to be a database thing. Now it is everywhere: PostHog meters events, ClickHouse meters compute and storage, Grafana meters five separate signals, Firecrawl and Langfuse and Novu meter credits and runs. Seven of the twenty price primarily on usage, nearly matching the eight that still price per seat.

What two years changed

For every tool that had a published 2023 pricing page — 17 of the 20 — here is the 2023-to-2026 delta. Each 2023 figure is quoted from an archived snapshot of that vendor’s pricing page (source links are in the data repo). Langfuse, Firecrawl, and Coolify had no 2023 pricing page and are new to this volume.

Compute got cheaper; seats got simpler

The headline most people miss: where metering is mature, the per-unit price went down. Vendors got more efficient and passed some of it on to win adoption.

The flat-rate tools mostly held or nudged up (Metabase +15–18%, Cal.com and Chatwoot flat), while the metered and hourly models came down. The lesson for buyers: on a usage-priced tool, time is on your side — rates trend down as the vendor scales. On a per-seat tool, you pay today’s price and it rarely falls.

AI credits: the line item that didn’t exist in 2023

None of the 2023 snapshots had an AI credit. By 2026 they are everywhere: ToolJet grants 2,000 AI credits per builder, Dify sells credit bundles, PostHog runs a separate AI-observability meter, and Chatwoot bills its Captain AI assistant at $20 per 1,000 credits. AI features arrived as a metered add-on bolted onto the existing model rather than folded into the base price — a new axis of spend on top of seats and usage. Budget for it separately; it is the easiest line to overlook and the fastest to grow.

Where pricing starts

For the tools with a fixed monthly entry tier, most start cheap — between $5 and $30/month, a self-hoster’s convenience fee. Above it sits a gap to the $59–$120 tier, where the tool is priced as serious infrastructure. PostHog, ClickHouse, and Grafana don’t appear here — they have no fixed entry price, only usage, so a quiet month costs almost nothing and a busy one can cost thousands.

The SSO tax, quantified

The entry price is rarely where the real money is. Single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and SLAs sit behind a higher tier almost everywhere. Here is the tier you actually have to buy to get SSO, sorted by cost:

The spread is enormous — from $9/seat (Twenty CRM treats SSO as table stakes) to a $25,000/year floor (Grafana). And the tax is migrating: Cal.com offered SAML SSO on its cheapest paid Teams tier in 2023; by 2026 it sits one tier up, on Organizations at $28/seat. The feature didn’t change. Its price did. If you build on any of these, find out where the SSO line is before a customer’s security review forces you across it.

What it means if you’re buying

• Read the license before the price. AGPL is fine internally; it only bites if you host and resell. The open-core split matters more — check whether the features you need are in the open core or the commercial directory.
• On usage-priced tools, expect rates to fall. PostHog and ClickHouse both cut per-unit prices since 2023. Model your real volumes in the vendor’s calculator; the headline rate is a ceiling that tends to drop.
• Price in the SSO tax early. The jump from a $20/month plan to a $25k/year commit is usually triggered by SSO or compliance, not features. Know where that line is before you build.
• Track the AI meter separately. AI credits are a new, easy-to-miss axis of spend. Treat them like any other usage line.

The full series

Every teardown below was re-verified against the vendor’s live pricing in 2026.

• PostHog — product analytics, usage-metered across 13 products
• ClickHouse — columnar database, compute + storage by usage
• Metabase — BI, base + per-user, $20k/year enterprise floor
• Cal.com — scheduling, MIT, $12/seat Teams
• Appsmith — internal tools, hourly billing dropped for $15/user
• ToolJet — internal tools, five tiers + AI credits
• Chatwoot — support inbox, MIT core + Captain AI credits
• Grafana — observability, five usage meters, $25k/year floor
• Dify — LLM app platform, modified Apache + credit bundles
• Langfuse — LLM observability, MIT core, usage units
• Firecrawl — web scraping, credit-based
• n8n — workflow automation, per-execution
• Windmill — workflow/internal tools, developer/operator split
• Temporal — durable execution, $100/month floor
• Plane — project management, AGPL, $6/seat
• Twenty CRM — CRM, AGPL, $9/seat
• Documenso — e-signing, AGPL-3.0
• Infisical — secrets management, MIT core + proprietary EE
• Novu — notifications, run-metered
• Coolify — self-hosted PaaS, $5/month cloud

We build Beton on top of a lot of these. Reading their pricing and licenses closely is part of the job — and the same data-quality discipline goes into the signals we ship.