It’s sometimes hard to understand how you keep a business running when you’ve open-sourced your entire stack, both consumers self-hosting but even worse would be a competitor just taking what you spend R&D budget on & rehosting it with a cheaper price since they don’t need to pay for that R&D. From a business perspective, do you see the operational challenge of running your stack at scale as the differentiator?

Not affiliated with OP and therefore unable to answer your question, but there's a lot of products that built traction that way: WordPress, GitLab, Discourse, Docker, Ubuntu, ...

I think it solves the problem of gaining traction today, at the expense of future market power. Then they face a choice of pulling a HashiCorp or being OK with being a commodity provider rather than a fancy unicorn.

I can see the appeal, a humble business is better than no business, isn't it?