# VibeGate Commercial Strategy

**Status:** This document describes potential future business model. **None of these features are implemented.**

## Executive Summary

VibeGate will remain open source for solo developers while offering paid collaboration and enterprise features for teams. This open-core model ensures:

- **Strong OSS**: Powerful free version for individuals and small teams
- **Sustainable development**: Revenue from larger organizations funds OSS improvements
- **Clear value proposition**: Pay for collaboration, not quality

## Product Tiers (Conceptual)

### OSS (Free Forever)

**Who:** Solo developers, small teams, hobbyists

**Included:**
- Complete quality orchestration (all checks)
- Deterministic gate decisions
- Evidence logging and audit trails
- Fix pack generation
- Local LLM helpers (Ollama, OpenAI-compatible)
- Static web UI viewer
- Plugin system (create and use plugins)
- Evolution pipeline (label → tune → propose)
- CLI tool

**Limitations:**
- No hosted UI
- No team collaboration features
- No automated PR creation

**Perfect for:**
- Personal projects
- Startups (<5 developers)
- Open source projects
- Learning and experimentation

### Pro (Paid - Future)

**Who:** Small teams (5-20 developers)

**Includes OSS +:**
- **Hosted UI** with shared history
- **Team dashboards** (trend analysis, comparisons)
- **Shared policy templates**
- **CI integration wizard**
- **Email notifications** for gate failures

**Price estimate:** $20-50/user/month

**Perfect for:**
- Growing startups
- Small product teams
- Agencies with multiple clients

### Team (Paid - Future)

**Who:** Medium teams (20-100 developers)

**Includes Pro +:**
- **Shared suppressions** with approval workflow
- **Auto-PR creation** with fixpack applied
- **Model routing** (best local model for your repo)
- **Advanced analytics** (quality trends, team insights)
- **Priority support**

**Price estimate:** $40-80/user/month

**Perfect for:**
- Mid-size companies
- Multiple teams on shared projects
- Teams with strict quality requirements

### Enterprise (Paid - Future)

**Who:** Large organizations (100+ developers)

**Includes Team +:**
- **Self-hosted option** (bring your own infrastructure)
- **SAML/SSO integration**
- **Audit bundle exports** (compliance-friendly)
- **Custom SLA**
- **Dedicated support**
- **Advanced role-based access control**
- **Custom policy pack creation service**

**Price:** Custom (contact sales)

**Perfect for:**
- Enterprises with compliance requirements
- Regulated industries (finance, healthcare)
- Organizations that can't use cloud SaaS

## Candidate Paid Features

### 1. Hosted UI + Shared History

**What:**
- Web-hosted dashboard accessible to team
- Historical run comparison
- Trend charts (findings over time)
- Cross-repo aggregation

**Why paid:**
- Hosting costs (storage, compute, bandwidth)
- User authentication and management
- Database infrastructure

**OSS alternative:**
- Static UI viewer (local only)
- Manual trend tracking via evidence.jsonl

**Value to teams:**
- Centralized visibility
- No infrastructure setup
- Team coordination easier

### 2. Team Collaboration Workflows

**What:**
- Shared suppressions with approval flow
- Policy template library (shared across repos)
- Team-level configuration management
- Notification system (Slack, email, webhooks)

**Why paid:**
- Backend services for approvals
- Real-time sync infrastructure
- Integration maintenance

**OSS alternative:**
- Git-based sharing (version control configs)
- Manual coordination

**Value to teams:**
- Formalized approval process
- Consistency across projects
- Reduced configuration drift

### 3. CI Integration Wizard

**What:**
- Visual setup for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.
- Auto-generated workflow files
- Integration health monitoring
- Guided troubleshooting

**Why paid:**
- Cloud service to generate configs
- Ongoing maintenance for CI platform changes
- Integration testing infrastructure

**OSS alternative:**
- Template-based setup (docs provide examples)
- Manual workflow creation

**Value to teams:**
- Faster onboarding
- Reduced misconfiguration
- Ongoing updates as CI platforms evolve

### 4. Auto-PR Creation with Fixpacks

**What:**
- Automatically create PR when gate fails
- Apply fixpack patches automatically
- Run verification checks before merging
- Guardrails (review requirements, test runs)

**Why paid:**
- Hosted service to manage PR lifecycle
- Git operations (clone, branch, commit, push)
- Verification infrastructure
- Security (credentials, permissions)

**OSS alternative:**
- Manual application of fixpack
- Agent prompt pack provides instructions for AI assistants

**Value to teams:**
- Reduced manual toil
- Faster fix iteration
- Automated quality enforcement

### 5. Model Routing/Benchmarking

**What:**
- Benchmark multiple local models on your codebase
- Automatically select best model for quality
- Track model performance over time
- Custom fine-tuning (future)

**Why paid:**
- Infrastructure to run benchmarks
- Storage for results
- Compute for model comparison

**OSS alternative:**
- Manual model selection
- Docs provide recommendations

**Value to teams:**
- Optimized LLM experience
- Data-driven model choice
- Consistent quality across team

### 6. Enterprise Exports

**What:**
- Audit bundle generation (evidence + reports in compliance-friendly format)
- SOC 2 / ISO 27001 compatible exports
- Attestation signing
- Long-term evidence archival

**Why paid:**
- Compliance expertise required
- Custom export formats
- Signature infrastructure

**OSS alternative:**
- Evidence.jsonl is already an audit trail
- Manual export/archival

**Value to enterprises:**
- Simplified compliance audits
- Reduced manual work
- Trusted attestation

## Business Model Principles

### 1. Never Paywall Core Quality

**The gate decision (PASS/FAIL) will never require payment.**

All quality checks, evidence logging, and fix pack generation remain free forever.

### 2. Pay for Collaboration, Not Quality

Paid features focus on **team coordination**, not individual capability:
- Hosted dashboards → share visibility
- Approval workflows → coordinate decisions
- Auto-PR → reduce toil
- SSO → manage team access

**Solo developers get full power for free.**

### 3. Local-First Philosophy

Even in paid tiers:
- **Local LLM helpers remain free** (Ollama, OpenAI-compatible)
- **Evidence stays local** (unless you choose hosted UI)
- **No vendor lock-in** (evidence.jsonl is portable)

### 4. Open Source Sustainability

Revenue from paid tiers funds:
- OSS development (new checks, better tuning, performance)
- Community support (docs, examples, plugin ecosystem)
- Infrastructure (CI, testing, releases)

**Larger organizations subsidize OSS for everyone.**

## Go-to-Market Strategy

### Phase 1: Build Community (v0.1 - v0.5)

**Timeline:** 2024 - Q2 2025

**Focus:**
- Grow OSS adoption
- Build plugin ecosystem
- Establish VibeGate as quality standard

**Revenue:** $0 (pure OSS)

**Success metrics:**
- GitHub stars
- PyPI downloads
- Community plugins
- Contributor growth

### Phase 2: Launch Pro Tier (v0.6)

**Timeline:** Q3 2025

**Focus:**
- Launch hosted UI (Pro tier)
- Simple pricing ($20-50/user/month)
- Self-service signup

**Revenue target:** $10k MRR

**Success metrics:**
- Pro subscribers
- Retention rate
- Feature usage

### Phase 3: Team & Enterprise (v1.0+)

**Timeline:** Q4 2025 - 2026

**Focus:**
- Team collaboration features
- Enterprise sales motion
- Self-hosted option

**Revenue target:** $100k MRR

**Success metrics:**
- Team/Enterprise customers
- Contract value
- Expansion revenue

## Competitive Positioning

### vs SonarQube/Codacy/CodeClimate

**VibeGate advantages:**
- **Local-first** (no cloud required for OSS)
- **Deterministic** (reproducible results)
- **Friendly by default** (plain English, not expert jargon)
- **AI integration** (local LLM helpers, agent prompt packs)

**Their advantages:**
- Established market presence
- Multi-language support (not just Python)
- Large enterprise sales teams

**VibeGate positioning:**
- **For Python teams that value local control and AI integration**

### vs Pre-commit Hooks/Manual CI

**VibeGate advantages:**
- **Comprehensive orchestration** (one command runs all checks)
- **Friendly outputs** (not just raw tool errors)
- **Evolution pipeline** (improve check quality over time)
- **Evidence trail** (audit log for compliance)

**Manual CI advantages:**
- No new tool to learn
- Maximum flexibility

**VibeGate positioning:**
- **Trade minimal overhead for massive DX improvement**

## Pricing Philosophy

### Value-Based Pricing

Charge based on **value delivered**, not seat count alone:

- **Pro:** Individual productivity (faster fixes, better understanding)
- **Team:** Coordination value (shared policies, approval flows)
- **Enterprise:** Compliance value (audit trails, attestation)

### Fair OSS-to-Paid Ratio

**OSS should be 80%+ of value for solo developers.**

Paid tiers add 20% (collaboration), not 100% (core quality).

### No Usage-Based Pricing

**No per-run, per-finding, or per-repo charges.**

Teams should run VibeGate as much as they want without worry.

## Revenue Projections (Speculative)

### Year 1 (2025)

- **OSS users:** 1,000+ (GitHub stars, PyPI downloads)
- **Pro subscribers:** 50 users ($30/user/month = $1.5k MRR)
- **Total ARR:** $18k

### Year 2 (2026)

- **OSS users:** 5,000+
- **Pro subscribers:** 200 users ($30/user/month = $6k MRR)
- **Team tier:** 50 users ($60/user/month = $3k MRR)
- **Enterprise:** 2 contracts ($50k each = $100k ARR)
- **Total ARR:** $208k

### Year 3 (2027)

- **OSS users:** 20,000+
- **Pro:** 500 users ($15k MRR)
- **Team:** 300 users ($18k MRR)
- **Enterprise:** 10 contracts ($500k ARR)
- **Total ARR:** $896k

**Caveat:** These are speculative projections, not commitments.

## Long-Term Vision

**VibeGate becomes the quality orchestrator for Python (like Docker for containers).**

- **Individual developers:** Use OSS for personal projects
- **Startups:** Use Pro for team coordination
- **Scale-ups:** Use Team for workflows
- **Enterprises:** Use Enterprise for compliance

The gate stays open source. The collaboration layer is the business.

## Next Steps

- Read `docs/OPEN_CORE_ROADMAP.md` for phased development plan
- Read `docs/PRODUCT_VISION.md` for product philosophy
- Read `CONTRIBUTING.md` to get involved with OSS
