Enterprises with over 1000 employees can contact us for discount pricing.
It's on the page you linked. I would suggest you look at MS for a better pricing model. Their Enterprise software costs more but you can get a huge bulk discount. Want to save money just buy more. The idea is to start working with a large company and then keep up selling them more stuff.
Yeah good point, however selling to a large organisation is difficult when your a small startup because decisions take a long time and often require you to meet them, submit proposals etc. Even then there is a very good chance they will turn around and say no, and not pay anything and go with a competitor.
But for 1000 users or more, you will need someone to support the software. And probably only that person knows the intricacies of the system. It obviously costs the company some money to devote a person to this open source product. Now if that person leaves, it is going to cost [in time and money] to find a replacement.
Often you don't need a whole person and you can split the role with several people even then to spread the risk. Even with SaaS or paid support issues are resolved slowly and require a technical person on the customer end anyway.
Open source software is actually pretty easy to support. Windows servers, Exchange and Oracle are all pretty bad and the support isn't great either + they cost money.
The problem is, if you want to sell your software to large user base then the per-user costs become prohibitive.
For example, say the Open Source product takes 100 hours to setup (which is generous) which is $5,500 and server costs are $4500/year = $10,000
You have a hosting product that requires no set and no server the subscription is $36/user so…
10 users = $360 (big win)
100 users = $3,600 (small win)
1,000 users = $36,000 (oh dear)
and it’s not unusual to have 10,000 users ($360,000)
You’d think that companies would get the problems with this model, but at least one company doesn’t: https://www.yammer.com/about/pricing