What “open core” actually means — day one, and day one thousand

Most open-core pages answer the wrong question. They describe what you get on day one — which is the easy day, the day everyone is trying to impress you. The revealing question is what you still have on day one thousand, after the pilot, the renewal, and the budget review that went badly.

For this product the answer to that question is unusually boring, and boring is the whole argument: the core is under the Apache 2.0 licence, which does not expire, cannot be withdrawn, and does not require anyone’s permission to keep using. That is a fact about a licence rather than a promise from a company, and the difference between those two things is most of what “open source” is worth on a vendor’s website.

The three questions behind the phrase

Strip the marketing away and a buyer evaluating an open-core product is asking three things:

1. What can I run without paying, and is it genuinely useful or deliberately hobbled?
2. What happens to my installation if the commercial relationship ends?
3. Can I check either of those myself, or am I taking your word for it?

The first is answered by a feature list. The second is answered by a licence. The third is answered by whether the source is public. Only one of those three is under our control after you sign, which is a useful thing to notice.

What the licence actually grants, and what it doesn’t

Apache 2.0 is a permissive open-source licence, and the grant in it is short enough to state plainly: you may use the code, read it, modify it, and redistribute it, including commercially. The grant is perpetual, and there is no clause under which the licensor takes it back.

What it does not give you is equally short, and worth saying out loud. It is not a warranty. It is not support. It is not a security contact who answers, and it is not an obligation on anybody to keep developing the thing. Those are all real needs, and they are things you either buy or build.

An open licence that gets oversold stops being useful as evidence of anything, which is the reason to be precise about it rather than enthusiastic.

The split, in two sentences

Practitioner and developer features are free and open: the full platform — AI Search, AI Assistant & AI Connectors — self-hosted under Apache 2.0, with unlimited users and unlimited projects. The paid Enterprise Edition adds the governance layer an IT or compliance function needs — single sign-on, role-based access control, full audit and compliance exports, deep query tracing — and the complete comparison is published on the pricing page rather than summarised here.

That is deliberately brief. The feature inventory is the least interesting thing about an open-core model and the most frequently repeated.

Day one thousand

Here is the part that nothing on a feature comparison table can tell you.

When a normal software subscription ends, the software stops. That is what you are buying: continued permission. When an Apache 2.0 licence is involved, there is no equivalent event, because the grant was never conditional on a payment and there is no clause under which the licensor can take it back. The Community Edition you are running on day one thousand is running for the same reason it ran on day one.

What does end, and should, is the commercial licence to the Enterprise Edition’s governance features. That is an ordinary consequence of a subscription ending and we are not going to dress it up as something else.

The honest framing is that these are two different kinds of commitment sitting in one product. One is a contract, with the normal properties of a contract. The other is a licence grant that neither party can unwind. An assurance that you will not be switched off is an intention, and intentions are held by people who move on. A permissive licence removes the question rather than answering it.

What we publish about price

This is the part of an open-core model where the argument is usually won or lost, so: the rates are on the page, all of them, to the top of the ladder.

The bands are graduated: each band prices only the seats inside it, so adding a seat never lowers the bill and the per-seat rate falls as you grow. Self-serve has no minimum — a three-person team pays €900 a year, which is the entire transaction. Our rate does not increase within a term. Larger or regulated deployments can add a services agreement on top of the Enterprise Edition, arranged by agreement; that is a services layer, not a second edition, and there has never been a second paid tier.

There is no quote to request, because the number is already published. That is the whole of our claim about pricing, and it is one you can verify by opening the pricing page in another tab.

What you actually keep if you walk away

Three things, and it is worth being precise about which is which:

What you do not automatically keep is freedom from every other form of lock-in.

An open licence removes the risk of being switched off and the risk of custody. It does nothing about the document formats you have standardised on, the integrations you built, or the operational knowledge that lives in three people’s heads. We wrote about those separately in the exit question, and the conclusion there holds here: self-hosting changes who holds the timing. It is not the same thing as freedom.

Why this shape, and not the other one

A line has to be drawn somewhere, and where it is drawn is the only real design decision in an open-core product. We drew ours at governance: features that only matter once somebody in your organisation has to answer for who accessed what.

That line has an unattractive property. A great deal of genuinely useful work — the whole retrieval pipeline, every connector, collaboration across a whole team — sits on the free side and never generates revenue. It has one attractive property that we thought outweighed it: you can state it in a sentence, and state it the same way to a developer and to a procurement officer. A line that needs a different explanation for each audience is usually not a line, it is a negotiating position.

The source is public, at github.com/ragsuite/RAGSuite, including the commercially licensed Enterprise directories. You can read what you would be buying before you buy it. If you never do, an open licence has bought you very little — inspectability only pays out when somebody inspects.

The honest summary

Open core is a structure, not a virtue. What makes a given implementation of it trustworthy is whether the free edition stands on its own, whether the paid additions form a coherent category, and whether the thing you keep at the end is guaranteed by a licence or by a vendor’s good intentions.

The version here: the core is Apache 2.0 and permanent, there is one paid edition and it adds governance, and every rate is published rather than quoted. Day one thousand looks a lot like day one, which is the only durable promise any of this can make.

Frequently asked questions

← All posts