> As the original author of the product you have the name recognition, and you have the best specialists for offering customer support. You will always be one step ahead in rolling out new features and bug fixes.

That is somewhat true but in many ways it turns out that customers treat the open source version as what it is: open source. This means that they do not shame, reject or decline the offer of some other company to provide bespoke deployments of open source SaaS. It’s not even just Amazon, there are also smaller companies who are interested in self hoisting Open Source software for their own customers. The time advantage does not appear to matter there.

You may also be one step behind when it comes to infrastructure related bugs or support if you want to focus on providing the best product. Competitors who host your product have a much smaller scope to worry about which may lead them to have a better infrastructure and support structure that customers flock to. E.g. Elastic vs AWS

Except infrastructure and support may also be the only revenue stream for the original developers too.

Some may say that’s exactly how it should be in the free market and I agree (since you chose the OSS license model over something else like FSL), but it does highlight how the original developers may feel this is an unfair situation.