[shoellinger]

Thank you for that question, michaelagustin. You are right: most popular SaaS tools in the conversational space are indeed priced per volume, usually per message or per (active) conversation.

As communication is core to every business, we strongly believe every company should own their conversations and utilize their conversational data in the best possible way, taking the interest and privacy of their customers into consideration.

We believe there is a unique opportunity now in the market to create an open source conversational stack and we would like to contribute to it with something we are good at and have a lot of experience in. Our goal is to create an open standard for the processing and storing of conversational data which is why we went open source.

This situation is perfectly suited from our perspective for an open core pricing model where we will continue to give away our Airy open source core platform for free under an Apache 2.0 license and sell additional enterprise licenses for optional features like advanced routing capabilities, team management, advanced storage and analytics solutions on top to enterprises that have additional requirements and more organizational complexity to deal with. Enterprises can run Airy Core + Airy Enterprise in their own private cloud or even on premise for privacy sensitive industries like banking, insurance or healthcare.

For business teams that want the full power of a conversational platform like Airy, but can't or don't want to dedicate engineering resources on their end, we also offer a fully managed Airy Cloud solution on the side. Because each Airy instance is fully independent, we can even offer this service in any region in case the relevant customer has preferences e.g. to store their conversational data exclusively in the EU or in a specific country or data center.