Hi all, I'm curious to get the community's take on the "open source" status of RudderStack (and RudderStack's take if they're willing to share). Basically I'm trying to figure out if self-hosting without a paid RudderStack account is seen as a viable path, or if that's more of a thing of the past. TBH it seems like the latter is the case what with the deprecation of the self-hosted control plane and the severe limits on the hosted control plane for open source (e.g. no API access). This is not meant to be a dig at RudderStack - it's excellent software and sometimes open source just isn't viable. I'm just trying to get a good read on the business model as someone new to this space. Thanks!

Hi Elliot, let me clarify your doubts. • Is it viable to use RudderStack Open Source without paid account? Yes, RudderStack Open Source data plane with RudderStack hosted control plane is being used at many large organisations. • What can you do with RudderStack Open Source? With RudderStack Open Source data plane, you can send unlimited no. of events from web, mobile, and server-side SDKs to all popular data warehouses and 138+ cloud destinations. No limitations. RudderStack Open Source feature list. • Is it a viable business model to support Open Source? RudderStack hosted data plane and Open Source data plane both share the same codebase and are actively maintained. Any feedback from the open source community makes the hosted project do better as well. On the other hand, the control plane has different codebase for RudderStack hosted control plane vs RudderStack Open Source control plane lite(deprecated). • RudderStack control plane lite deprecation: We found it in the best interest of the community to let RudderStack control plane be led by the community only. While RudderStack team won't contribute code in control plane lite anymore, we will support if anyone from the community wants to contribute to RudderStack control plane lite. RudderStack hosted control plane will be completely functional for RudderStack Open Source data plane without any limitations. Limitations may arise only for the features that are not covered in RudderStack Open Source feature list. And even in that case you can create your own control plane by building on top of RudderStack control plane lite. If you have any feedback related to this deprecation approach, do share your thoughts in this thread. Having said that, if there's any challenge you're facing in using RudderStack Open Source data plane with RudderStack hosted control plane, do share in #open-source so we can fix that. If you have any feature request or feature for RudderStack hosted control plane (or any other project), do share them in #feedback-and-roadmap

Helpful, thank you for the detailed response!