Why For-Profit Companies Open-Source Their Products: Lessons from Rupt

I like small teams. We build a lot of internal products at Rupt from email validation, to scraping detection, to AI agents that help us with sales, support, and other tasks. This helps keep us small, lean, and a fast team.

Last week, we open-sourced our email validation service. In the next week or two, we'll be open-sourcing even more of our products.

I never really understood why for-profit companies maintained open-source projects, or how they were profitable despite all their intellectual property being open-source.

The Three Reasons Behind Open-Source Success

There are three main reasons that make open-source a viable business strategy:

1. Developers need quick, free solutions

Developers often need a super quick solution to start with, and they need it free. Open-source allows for both. It removes friction from the initial adoption and lets developers test and validate solutions immediately.

2. Brand awareness and product familiarization

Open-sourcing products helps familiarize people with the rest of the company's products and brand. When developers use your open-source tool and have a positive experience, they're more likely to explore your other offerings and remember your brand when they need a paid solution.

3. Preference for managed solutions at scale

At scale, people usually prefer using hosted and managed solutions rather than dealing with the hassle themselves. Self-hosting involves lots of maintenance, updates, patches, and infrastructure management. As organizations grow, the cost of managing open-source tools internally often exceeds the cost of a paid, managed service.

Our Experience at Rupt

We've found that all three of those reasons hold true for the products we've open-sourced at Rupt (see emailhawk for example). The response has been encouraging, and we're excited to release more open-source tools in the coming weeks.

By open-sourcing our internal tools, we're not only giving back to the developer community but also building relationships with potential customers who may eventually need the enterprise-grade, managed solutions we offer.

If you're considering open-sourcing your internal tools, these three principles are worth keeping in mind. The key is understanding that open-source and profitability aren't mutually exclusive—they can actually complement each other when approached strategically.