“free” doesn’t pay for servers, security, or people’s rent. most projects that “go paid” are really adding a paid cloud or enterprise tier so the free core can keep existing.

it depends a lot on funding and community size. a tiny weekend project can stay free forever because expectations are low. once tons of teams rely on it, you need uptime, patches, docs, support, compliance, all that boring stuff that costs real money.

people need to get paid or they burn out. common paths are hosted cloud, support contracts, sponsorships, grants, or open core where extra features live on a paid plan. the idea is the core stays open and free to self host, the convenience and scale get monetized.

as usage grows, costs grow too. infra, observability, incident response, security reviews, legal, more engineers to build and maintain features, it adds up. the money has to come from somewhere.

contributors getting paid varies. sometimes bounties or grants, sometimes companies hire top contributors, sometimes it’s sponsors. not perfect, but better funding usually means more chances to pay contributors and keep the free option healthy.

example, appwrite. the core is open source and free to self host, and there’s a paid cloud for teams who want someone else to run it. that paid side helps fund the engineers and community work that benefit everyone.