practical guides on running an open-source and a paid saas version of the same product — feature flags per tier, git workflows that don't fork, and why a config file beats an enterprise branch.
a practical workflow for shipping an open-source and a paid saas version of one product from a single repo — tiers, feature flags, and zero branch syncing.
12 june 2026how founders use boolean feature flags with per-tier values to ship free, pro, and saas editions from one codebase — defaults, overrides, and generated config explained.
11 june 2026comparing the ways teams keep open-source and saas code apart — forks, enterprise branches, private submodules, and per-tier flags — and which survive contact with reality.
10 june 2026how teams running free + paid editions of one product cut ci minutes, release steps, and on-call surface by collapsing per-edition branches into per-tier flag config.
9 june 2026ifdef-style conditional compilation doesn't fit javascript and typescript products. comparing build-time defines, dead-code elimination, and per-tier flag config as alternatives.
8 june 2026long-lived edition branches look free on day one. the real costs — duplicated fixes, drift, slowed releases, and bus-factor risk — compound quietly until they dominate roadmaps.
7 june 2026a how-to for shipping one fix to every edition of your product at once: single mainline, per-tier flag config, superset testing, and release notes generated from the flag matrix.
6 june 2026trunk-based development for open-core companies: how to run one public mainline, a thin private package, and per-tier flag config instead of edition branches.
5 june 2026if you sell a hosted version of an open-source project, per-tier feature flags are the honest contract between the two — protecting community trust while keeping the paid difference explicit.
4 june 2026