I can only tell you my experience as a newcomer to PostHog last year. I went to try it out, and visited the documentation to figure out how to get it up and running. The documentation sent a very clear message of “You’d be a fucking idiot to put this into production. The open-source version is pathetic and can’t handle real traffic. Pay us.”. This immediately killed all interest I had in PostHog and I didn’t go any further. Your open-source version doesn’t have to scale indefinitely, but if you can’t stand behind your open-source version at all, I don’t trust your commercial version at all either. A closed-source product is preferable to an open-source product where the maintainers strongly warn people not to use it.
This is well said and I agree. It is disingenuous and raises cognitive dissonance to offer something but not stand behind it and in fact warn people NOT to use it.