There’s an image I can’t get out of my head. A software vendor carefully installing a padlock on their garden gate. A nice padlock, solid, with a “Pro/Enterprise” label. The problem is there’s no wall around the garden anymore. Just the padlock, alone, planted in the void.

That’s exactly what the open-core model has become in 2025.

The deal that made sense

The principle was simple: you publish a free version of your software, you keep the best features for the paid version. Open code gives you distribution, locked features give you revenue. Everyone wins.

Except code has become a commodity.

With LLMs, any open-source codebase is now training data. You can fork it, replicate it, or build something similar without breaking a sweat. The moat is no longer in the code. It never really was, but now it’s visible to the naked eye.

So what’s the point of locking features behind a paywall when the underlying code has no defensible value?

Two coherent positions

I see two defensible approaches.

You’re full open-source and you monetize what’s actually hard to replicate—which varies by market, but it’s never the code itself. Support, hosting, integrations, trust, compliance, speed of iteration. The code is the gift; the business is built on everything around it.

Or you’re closed-source and your product IS the value. The code stays proprietary because that’s where the differentiation lives. No pretense of openness, no community theater.

Both are honest.

The hybrid model no longer is. It destroys trust without protecting anything.

The erosion

Every time a user sees “Pro only” on a feature they could use, something erodes. It’s not passing frustration. It’s the gradual realization that the free version is frustrating by design. That the paid version merely fixes friction that was intentionally created.

And once you’ve seen that, you can’t unsee it.

The open-core pitch says: “We give you value for free, and charge for more.” The reality increasingly feels like: “We give you a demo, and charge you to remove the annoyances.”

The new landscape

The padlock without a wall protects nothing. It just signals that there was something to protect, once.

Companies still clinging to open-core are betting that users won’t notice the wall is gone. That the brand, the ecosystem, the switching costs will keep them paying for features that could be rebuilt in a weekend.

Some will keep paying. Inertia is real. But the model’s legitimacy is draining away, one “Pro only” badge at a time.

The future belongs to those who pick a lane: genuinely open, or genuinely proprietary. The middle ground has collapsed.