HN – Ask HN: Has anyone tried alternative company models (like a co-op) for SaaS?

Long story short, I'm building a new product and will likely launch it as a yearly SaaS with a permissive license. I'm later in my career and am mostly building it for fun, but I think it has potential to be a good, small business that I'd have fun fiddling with for a long time.

I went through and set up the usual LLC, but was curious about how I could set it up to be a member or worker-owned company. Has anyone done anything like that from the beginning? Should I just worry about this later?

With licensing, the typical model has been to make your core permissive, and keep the hosting / billing application private. Has anyone made even that part of their SaaS open? I know that would make is really easy to fork the business, but was thinking something like a time-gated Functional Source License (FSL) might work?

I'm open to ideas. I don't see this discussed commonly on HN, so figured it was a good topic.

Ask HN: Has anyone tried alternative company models (like a co-op) for SaaS?

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