Sourcebot is now closed source
Starting with v6, future Sourcebot development will take place in a private repository. We'll continue distributing releases for self-hosting, and previous releases will remain publicly available. We're also making paid features available on the free plan for up to five users. See the updated pricing plans.
How it started
A lot has happened in the past two years.
When we shared our open source code search tool to the world, most engineers were just beginning to experiment with AI coding agents. Sonnet 3.5 was the state of the art (with o1 coming soon) and the the idea of a fast code search web app seemed like something devs would want. We launched Sourcebot on HN, hit the front page, and immediately got deployed within a few massive companies. That was the signal we needed to continue working on Sourcebot full-time.
At this point we only had some funding from friends and family, but that paid for this tiny WeWork space in Vancouver and our meals. Many hours were spent pushing releases in this little box, and we eventually turned Sourcebot into the best open source code search tool in the world here.
Evolving Sourcebot past search
Developers were loving the tool, but we knew we had to eventually evolve Sourcebot past just an open source code search tool. Mainly because we saw that a code search web UI was becoming less important, but also because we needed a sustainable way to support ourselves. We weren't exactly sure what evolving Sourcebot meant at the time, but we launched Sourcebot MCP and Ask Sourcebot, got into YC, then moved to SF.
Commercial open source
Around this time we adopted an open-core business model, which introduced the first paid features. We started getting revenue for the first time. However, envisioning a sustainable business on this model became increasingly difficult as agentic tooling advanced. Open-core is built on the assumption that teams would rather pay than build features on top of an open source core. With the cost of developing software shrinking the longevity of this assumption was being put into serious question. It felt like we were building a business on a foundation that would not exist in a couple years.
As a result, we found ourselves continually relicensing functionality to our enterprise plan. At the same time, the industry (and as a result our product) was changing rapidly. Agents, not humans, became the primary entity reading and writing software. What started as a tool to help humans understand code was becoming a tool to help agents understand code. Our user requests switched from improvements to our search UI to more powerful ways for their agents to retrieve and cache knowledge about their codebases.
It became clear that companies in the future would be running millions of agents, and each one of those agents needed a fast and reliable way of reading company information (including their code). Needless to say, our vision for Sourcebot has changed significantly since our time in that tiny box in Vancouver.
Deciding to close source
We've decided to close source Sourcebot for two reasons:
- We're no longer confident that open-core can sustain the business we want to build.
- We want to invest in new ways for agents to capture and retrieve knowledge without making that work immediately available to competitors.
New releases will continue to be published on our GitHub container registry. We've also restructured our pricing model to enable teams to use all of our core functionality for free up to 5 users. Learn more here
Thank you to all of you who use Sourcebot daily and continue to provide us with valuable feedback. We hope that this change will allow us to continue building a tool you love to use.
If you'd like to join our team and build what's next, check out our open positions.
