ESTC’s business model is predominantly from recurring subscriptions.
You pay to get access to their SaaS offerings:
Or you pay a certain subscription level to get “closed” features and/or have them support you with you use/deployment of any of their products:
https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions
This gives a pretty good picture of how their revenue model works:
https://medium.com/@alexfclayton/elastic-ipo-s-1-breakdown-1…
About your other questions, it is not apparent/easy to understand but in order to understand why most of their stuff is “open”, it generally has to do with where they came from and their open-source and community-driven culture. The want to build the best products (in their domain) and they want to get to the hands of as many people as possible with as little friction as possible. In addition, they realize that the open-source community has as much to do to contributing to their success so they try to give back as much as they can to keep the spirit going. Because of this, the adoption and popularity of their products is/has been extremely rapid and is a testament to how good their stuff is and their “open” attitude, mentality, and culture. I personally do not believe that they could have gotten to where they are today without the community and their “openness”.
I’ve owned ESTC in the past, but don’t own it anymore. I keep itching to buy it because the growth rate is good and their developer mindshare is strong, but don’t have the confidence to take a big position.
Why? Because of their complete open source model. As I understand it, even the proprietary features of their offering (formerly called X-pack) are open source.
I’m not a technie, but can someone help me understand how this is a good thing for the business? What is to stop developers from using the code, the free open source stuff and the proprietary open source code in their products without paying ESTC? What is to stop competitors in the future from using the completely open source code base to build a competing offering?
As far as I know, this is the only company with this model. MDB has a free open source version, but it’s premium features aren’t open source. From a business perspective, that model makes much more sense to me.
How is this a good thing for ESTC?