We're leaning heavily into the open source aspect. We think that a solution like this will be useful to even smaller teams (10-50) that other companies won't want to target. There is some non-trivial amount of setup required, specifically chasing down the API keys etc. So for the SaaS alternatives, they rely heavily on their sales orgs being very hands on so it makes no sense for them to target small teams. In fact for many of them, if you try to sign up for a demo and you say you're less than 50 people, they straight up ignore you.

So hopefully teams will self-adopt Danswer and as they grow, they will keep using us!

For larger teams, the transparency and peace of mind of self-hosting an open source solution is also a major benefit. We've often heard from large teams that have adopted Danswer, that the customizability of it has been a driving factor in their adoption. They want to own the solution and they want to customize it specifically for their needs. At the very basic level, a lot of teams have swapped in domain specific embedding models and prompts but we've seem some significantly more involved customizations as well.