Corporate Strategy · Operating Review · Board Pre-Read

Approve the plan: cut burn 35%, protect the open core.

Open Design's Q2 operating review — growth, burn, and the concrete path to sustainability, without gating the Apache-2.0 project that got us here.

Recommendation

Extend runway to 22 months without touching the open core.

Growth is not the problem — 76K GitHub stars and 200+ community plugins prove demand. The gap is cost structure: we're subsidizing every user's model calls. The fix is to make BYOK the default, license self-hosted enterprise deployments, and leave the open-source desktop app untouched.

42%

Cloud inference spend cut, from $187K to $109K/month, since local-first agent routing shipped in Q1.

Options considered

Three paths to sustainability.

A — Hold course

Keep subsidizing hosted inference. Burn stays flat at $187K/mo; runway closes to 9 months by Q4.

B — BYOK default (recommended)

Users bring their own model keys by default. Cuts hosted inference cost ~40% with zero change to the open-source app.

C — Enterprise self-host license

Charge for managed self-hosted deployments and support, on top of B, without paywalling any existing feature.

If we gate any existing plugin or feature behind a paywall to hit these numbers, we break the open-source flywheel that built the 200+ plugin ecosystem — that risk isn't worth the savings.

— Risk flagged jointly by Engineering and Community leads

Decision needed by July 23 board meeting

Approve BYOK-default plus the enterprise self-host license.

Owners: Maria Chen (CFO) runs the burn-down plan · Alex Osei (Head of Platform) ships BYOK-default in Q3 · Community leads keep plugin governance fully open throughout.

1 / 6

← / → to navigate