httptoolkit-ui VS accounts

> Monetization via Paid Premium Version / Open Core

This point is interesting, because it assumes the only way to do premium is with a closed-source version, losing the open-source benefits.

Personally I've had good success (i.e. comfortably enough income as a solo bootstrapped project that I can work on open source full time) doing a freemium approach that's 100% open-source for http://httptoolkit.tech

Yes, anybody can fork the project and remove the payment checks (here: https://github.com/httptoolkit/httptoolkit-ui/blob/5cf0b10c6...) but it's a non-trivial hassle to fork everything and hook it all up, and means ongoing maintenance work to manage a fork forever, so at the price it's not really worth any serious professional's time (and I give out free licenses for everybody would contributes to the code anyway).

Works well, lets you stay 100% open source, which is good for everybody and encourages contributions, and you can still make enough money to fund development (never going to make anybody a billionaire, but that's not the point).

To access the paid bits, you log in with your email (passwordless: it emails you a code to login) either online (https://httptoolkit.tech/get-pro/) or in the app itself, and you complete an online checkout (managed by Paddle.com) to subscribe for X duration.

As long as you're logged into the app itself, it makes a check on startup with your auth token to see if your current subscription is still active. If it's active, all the paid features turn on.

No passwords, no license keys, auth & subscription data storage managed by Auth0, and one tiny accounts server that glues the checkout & auth0 together (which is also open source: https://github.com/httptoolkit/accounts/).

That's the normal flow, but assuming you don't change the code it works the same whether you use the hosted deployment or you fully self-host the core app.