vastbinderj

We have spent 3 years building out our ecommerce platform and are successfully selling into the mid-market space where we charge enterprise prices.

We just finished a round of performance and scalability tests where we can support up to 500 concurrent shoppers on 2 T2.small instances and easily handle 100 concurrent shoppers on the free tier using a single T2.micro instance.

This has us thinking of trying to break into the SMB Market where Shopify and Big Commerce dominate. We know we cannot compete with their marketing budgets so we are contemplating releasing a free developer version limited to use of only SQLite for the database, (we support mongodb, mysql or postgresql in production) and pulling out some of our more enterprise-like integrations. Ottemo is built in golang for the API server and our current stores are built in AngularJS 1.x

We would provide binaries of our API server which will include SQLite and Open Source our demo store code to allow customization and creation of themes.

Will this dilute our value to our mid-market customers paying enterprise prices? Will this block potential investment from VCs if we expand down market into the SMB space with a free version?