Two investors told us not to open source PitchShow. Separately. In the same week. One said "you're giving away your moat." The other said "at least wait until you have traction."
We nodded. We said we'd think about it. Then we pushed the repo public anyway.
I want to explain why — not to be contrarian, but because I think the conversation around open source and commercial software is weirdly contaminated by fear disguised as strategy.
The argument against open source is usually fear
When people say "don't open source your moat," what they're usually saying is: "if someone can see how you built it, they can copy it."
Here's what I kept thinking when I heard that: if someone can rebuild PitchShow by reading our code and forking it, then we deserve to lose.
That's not bravado. It's a genuinely useful test. If our only competitive advantage is that the source code is hidden, we're already in trouble. If a team of developers can spend two months reading our code, rebuilding the core, and shipping a better version — they should win. That's how this is supposed to work.
The stuff that actually makes PitchShow worth using isn't in the repo. It's the AI pipeline we've tuned for presentation generation specifically. It's the industry templates we've built from studying hundreds of real decks. It's the Brand Kit that accumulates knowledge about you over time. It's the Animated PPTX synthesis engine we've been debugging for months. None of that is open source. The GitHub repo is the client. The product is the service.
Who actually finds you on GitHub
Here's something that took us a while to fully appreciate: the person who clones your repo is not the person who was going to pay you anyway.
They're a developer. They love digging into source code. They want to understand how something works, maybe spin up their own instance, maybe contribute a fix. They were never going to open a credit card and sign up for a cloud subscription. And that's completely fine.
What they will do is tell someone. Maybe their CTO. Maybe a colleague who has a board meeting in three days and is staring at a blank slide deck at 10pm. Maybe they post about it somewhere and 40,000 people see it. Technical users are the most credible distribution channel that exists, and open source is how you reach them.
We got a Hacker News post that drove more signups in 48 hours than our paid ads had in two weeks. It happened because someone found the repo, built it, liked it, and wrote about it. We had nothing to do with it. That's what open source does — it creates fans who go places you can't.
The honest part: it's also the right thing to do
I don't want to be too cynical about this. The strategic argument is real. But there's also just a reason that exists outside the spreadsheet.
A researcher in a cash-strapped university can use the full PitchShow desktop app to make a better conference presentation. A founder in a country where $12/month is a real expense can run it locally with their own API key. A teacher in a school with no software budget can use it to build better lesson slides.
Those people are never going to be in our growth metrics. They're never going to appear in our MRR. But the tool reaching them — that matters to us. Not because it's good marketing. Because it's the kind of software we wanted to exist in the world when we started building this.
If the only way we can survive is to lock it down from those people, we'll revisit. But we haven't had to. The people who need the cloud features pay for them. The people who need the free local version use it freely. Both groups make each other possible.
What "open core" actually looks like in practice
For the people wondering about the mechanics: the desktop app is fully open source under Apache 2.0. Download it, run it, fork it, ship it in something commercial — the license allows all of it.
The cloud service — hosted AI, Animated PPTX export, show hosting, Brand Kit — runs on our infrastructure and isn't in the repo. That's what Pro subscriptions cover. The economics are simple: we charge for compute and service we provide, not for software you run yourself.
The two products serve different people. The free desktop app serves people who are comfortable managing API keys and running local software. The cloud serves people who want to log in and start immediately, without configuration. Both are real products. Neither one is bait for the other.
Would I do it again?
Yes. Without hesitation.
The investors who told us not to were thinking about protecting value we didn't have yet. The open source decision is part of how we're building the value in the first place. You can't separate them.
There's a version of this company that kept the code closed, got slightly better initial metrics, and then found itself unknown in the communities that most influence what developers adopt and recommend. I don't want to build that company. The one we're building is more interesting.