Why Elastiflow Abandoned Open Source as Their Primary GTM Strategy

Why Elastiflow Abandoned Open Source as Their Primary GTM Strategy

The open source playbook sounds perfect in theory: release powerful technology for free, watch adoption soar, then monetize the edges through enterprise features or support. Thousands of GitHub stars become testimonials. Active contributors become advocates. And somewhere in that virtuous cycle, a business emerges.

Except it often doesn’t. And for Elastiflow, the gap between community traction and actual revenue became impossible to ignore.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Robert Cowart, CEO and Co-Founder of Elastiflow, shared the uncomfortable truth about their open source experiment—why downloads and stars didn’t translate to dollars, and what they had to build instead to create a sustainable business.

The Initial Open Source Bet

Elastiflow’s journey into open source wasn’t naive. Robert was solving a real problem in network visibility, and open source seemed like the natural distribution mechanism for infrastructure software. Release the core technology, let practitioners discover it, build credibility through usage.

“We had released a network flow collector as an open source project that was based on Elastic and Logstash and got a fair amount of traction with that,” Robert explained. The metrics looked encouraging—downloads, GitHub activity, community engagement. All the signals that typically indicate product-market fit.

But there was a problem lurking underneath those vanity metrics. “One of the challenges with that is that it doesn’t necessarily build a business on its own and you need to figure out a way to monetize.”

This is the sentence that should be tattooed on every technical founder considering open source as their primary GTM strategy. Traction doesn’t equal revenue. Usage doesn’t equal willingness to pay. And community engagement doesn’t equal enterprise contracts.

The Monetization Gap

The challenge Elastiflow faced isn’t unique—it’s the central tension of every open source business model. If your free offering solves the core problem well enough, why would anyone pay for more?

Traditional answers include enterprise features, managed services, or support contracts. But these only work if there’s a meaningful gap between what the open source version provides and what enterprises actually need. And if you make that gap too wide, you’re not really open source—you’re just freemium with extra steps.

For Elastiflow, the network flow collector they released as open source was genuinely useful. It collected network data effectively. It integrated with popular tools like Elastic and Logstash. For many users, it solved their immediate problem completely.

The conversion rate from free users to paying customers remained stubbornly low. Not because the paid features weren’t valuable, but because the friction of getting budget approval, running procurement, and implementing a commercial solution exceeded the incremental value for most users.

This is where open source businesses hit the wall. You’ve created something valuable enough that people use it. But you haven’t created something valuable enough—or painful enough without—that they’ll pay for it.

The False Comfort of Community Metrics

One of the most insidious aspects of open source as GTM strategy is that community metrics provide false comfort. Active repositories feel like progress. Contributor discussions feel like validation. GitHub stars feel like market traction.

But these metrics optimize for the wrong outcome. They measure engagement, not commercial intent. They track usage, not urgency. They count users, not buyers.

For infrastructure startups, this creates a particularly dangerous trap. Your users are often engineers who love your technology but don’t control budgets. They’ll implement your open source tool, praise it publicly, and never pay you a dollar because they don’t have to.

Meanwhile, the buyers—CIOs, VPs of Engineering, procurement teams—never hear about your open source project because it spreads through technical channels, not commercial ones. You’ve built distribution in the wrong audience segment.

What Actually Required Rebuilding

Elastiflow’s pivot away from open source as their primary strategy wasn’t just about changing pricing. It required rethinking their entire product approach.

The open source network flow collector was designed for engineers who wanted to self-deploy and integrate with existing tools. It was optimized for flexibility and customization—values the open source community prizes.

But enterprise buyers needed something different. They needed reliability guarantees, security certifications, support SLAs, and deployment models that matched their infrastructure patterns. Most critically, they needed a solution designed for their environment, not a general-purpose tool they’d need to adapt.

This realization led to one of Elastiflow’s most important decisions: rebuilding for cloud-native environments from the ground up. “We realized that to really effectively do observability for those types of environments, we need to build a solution that is designed from the ground up to actually run in those environments, be deployed with the same CICD, GitOps type automation tools that devops teams are used to using,” Robert explained.

This wasn’t an iteration on the open source project. It was a fundamental rearchitecture optimized for different priorities—enterprise requirements over community flexibility, commercial value over adoption metrics.

The Hard Truth About Open Source Revenue

The uncomfortable reality Elastiflow discovered is that open source works best as distribution, not as business model. It can create awareness, establish credibility, and seed adoption. But converting that into revenue requires a commercial offering distinct enough that enterprises will pay for it.

This distinction matters more than most founders realize. If your commercial product is just “open source plus features,” you’re fighting uphill. Enterprises will wonder why they can’t just use the free version. Sales cycles extend as prospects debate whether they really need the paid tier. And competitors can fork your open source code and build their own commercial layer.

The alternative—which Elastiflow ultimately pursued—is building a commercial product that shares DNA with the open source project but serves fundamentally different use cases. The open source version remained valuable for its target audience. The commercial platform targeted different problems for different buyers.

What Worked Instead

Elastiflow’s path forward combined elements of open source with a more traditional enterprise software model. They maintained a community edition that prospects could download and evaluate, providing the try-before-you-buy motion that PLG companies leverage.

But they built commercial features and deployment models specifically for enterprise needs. “We have a product led growth motion where people can download and try our community edition free of charge,” Robert noted. This creates inbound pipeline without relying on open source community building as the primary growth engine.

The key difference: the free tier exists to facilitate enterprise sales, not to build a community hoping it will somehow monetize. It’s a tool in the sales process, not the sales process itself.

They also layered in direct sales motion. “We’re primarily focused on direct selling. So we have an outbound motion. We also have a good amount of inbound that we get through our website, through people that are downloading and trying our community edition.”

This hybrid approach—free tier for evaluation, direct sales for conversion—proved more effective than pure open source because it aligned free usage with commercial intent from the start.

The Pattern Recognition

What emerges from Elastiflow’s experience is a pattern other infrastructure founders should recognize: open source creates usage, but revenue requires different building blocks.

Those blocks include commercial features enterprises actually need, deployment models that match how they operate, pricing that creates clear value separation from free tiers, and sales processes designed to engage buyers, not just users.

The hardest part isn’t admitting open source alone doesn’t monetize well—that’s increasingly accepted wisdom. The hardest part is having the discipline to build commercial offerings different enough to justify payment, even when that means rebuilding rather than iterating.

Robert’s candor about this challenge offers a valuable lesson: “One of the challenges with that is that it doesn’t necessarily build a business on its own and you need to figure out a way to monetize.” The GitHub stars don’t pay salaries. The active contributors don’t sign contracts. And the download metrics don’t fund product development.

At some point, you need customers who pay. And building for them requires different choices than building for community adoption. Elastiflow learned this lesson the hard way—through experimentation, false starts, and eventually a willingness to rebuild for where the money actually was.

For technical founders drawn to open source’s elegance and community ethos, that’s the uncomfortable truth worth confronting early. Open source can be a tool in your GTM strategy. But unless you’ve solved the monetization problem upfront, it probably shouldn’t be the foundation of it.