The open core model is fine, but your community edition should be a reasonably complete product. Gitlab is a good example of this. They're not selling access, they're selling convenience.

The features that differentiate to enterprise customers don't matter to small shops anyhow: policy compliance, monitoring, fancy reporting, fine grained access control,etc. Give away tools that are useful for individuals and small teams, and charge for the features that are large team/enterprise related.

Blender did it by facing the industry going cutting edge for a decade or more. They somehow found enough donation to keep the thing as indie would support it just enough. Today blender is arguably better than industry standards, they just have to face the marketing wave but like Wikipedia probably got plenty of support.

These are the rare examples of Linux going through the torrent, typically emerges as proud victorious, with reasonably low profile

> What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?

Same price for same core feature set would be a good start. Or lower price for smaller feature set.

Having a premium price for a reduced product means your target audience is limited to people willing to pay a premium for a lesser product to support open source. There are some groups willing to do this, but most simply want a tool that does the job without adding too much to their already huge SaaS budget.

I’m extremely sensitive to core workflow tools for a company these days. It only takes a few days of lost work because some tool corrupted your design or the engineers have to spend a few days working around an issue in a tool to make the effective cost of using that tool extremely high.

Engineering time is expensive. If a tool that costs $20 per person per month causes even one issue per month that potentially produces hours of work and rework (like the spontaneously resizing element a commenter above noted) then the true cost is going to be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in lost productivity.

There are multiple models:

1. Like Sentry - open source all the features, provide the cloud (hosted) version. Most businesses don't want to self-host, but want a bit cheaper alternative

2. Paid tier, buy once - own forever with 1 year update support. Later you can charge lower price to extend the update cycle.

3. Blender model - donations. Very hard to get it right.

4. Laravel/Next.js model - Open source the tooling, monetize the platform