Business model

How we make money by giving away software

To achieve this goal we adopted a freemium business model centered around our flagship product OpendTect. Basically we create a customer base by giving away OpendTect for free while we generate business by offering premium services to these customers. We generate income from selling commercial plugins, providing maintenance & support, offering consultancy services and training, executing paid software development projects and last but certainly not least by conducting proprietary case study projects.

OpendTect is released under a Triple Licensing scheme: the same software is available for free under an Open Source agreement (GNU General Public License v3) and under a Commercial agreement. The third type of license is the Academic license under which Universities are offered free access to OpendTect and all of the commercial plugins. Follow this link to learn which license agreement suits you best.

Why would someone pay for something that is also available for free?

Also under the Commercial license agreement OpendTect has zero license fee. You only pay for maintenance & support. Commercial users pay this annual fee because they either want to run the commercial plugins (which under this agreement they can buy or lease), or they want to develop software without the obligation to publish their source code, or they simply want to secure priority support.