Business Model
We're busy building, and this is one of those things that is a work in progress!
While Openline is responsible for running and improving the open source Openline project, Openline is still a for profit company, and as such balances the needs of the company to be profitable (and therefore keep existing to improve the Openline project). To do this Openline has to balance the needs of the community using the Openline ecosystem with building paid features and supporting our paying customers, in order to generate income to keep the business running.
Why is Openline an Open Source company?
Openline's mission to simplify customer data into a single place to be federated across multiple applications that want to use this data will be most likely to succeed if more people are using customerOS and the application ecosystem built over the top of customerOS. In order to maximise the distribution of customerOS, it makes sense to provide this to all for free under an Open Source license. Maximising the number of companies and projects using customerOS will result in more features being developed by the community and more apps solving problems using your customer data to be produced.
We are aware we cannot build every tool to help you better utilise your first party customer data, and as such we want to enable anyone to be able to build what they need on this purpose-built, aggregate data layer that is customerOS.
What can't I access without paying?
To be completed
