How Cap makes money from open source software

This is the first post in a series where I look at how software companies make money.

I want to read pricing pages the way I read code, looking at what is sold, what is free, and what protects the paid part. Then I want to ask a more selfish question. What can we copy as indie developers, with no team and no funding?

I’m starting with Cap, an open source screen recorder. I picked it because the tension is right there in the open. The full code is on GitHub, and there is also a pricing page.

Prices and features below were checked on September 21, 2026.

What Cap is

Cap is a screen recorder for macOS and Windows. You record your screen and camera, and you get either a local video file or a share link.

Cap sells itself as the open source alternative to Loom. Atlassian acquired Loom, which costs $18 per user per month on its Business plan and keeps every video on its servers. Cap’s pitch is the same idea at half the price, and you own your data.

The desktop app is built with Rust and Tauri. The web app, where share links live, is Next.js. There is also a media server, a MySQL database, and S3-compatible storage. All of it is in one monorepo.

The project started in November 2023. Today it has about 22,500 GitHub stars.

The four things you can pay for

The pricing page has three plans plus a free tier. I’ll go through them from cheapest to most expensive, because each one sells a different thing.

Free

The free version is the full desktop app. You get the editor, 4K export, and no time limit on local recordings.

It has two limits. Shareable cloud links stop at 5 minutes, and the app is for personal use only.

Nothing in the app checks whether you’re at work, though. The personal-use rule lives in the license, and the code doesn’t enforce it.

Desktop License, $29 a year

This gives you commercial usage rights and a small cloud allotment: 20 shareable links per month, still capped at 5 minutes each. Local recording stays unlimited. Their docs also list a $58 one-time option.

What does “commercial” mean here? Their licensing page defines it as recording anything for revenue-generating activities. Demoing your company’s product counts. Sending a video to a coworker counts.

So if you use Cap at your job, you owe them $29 a year. Apart from those 20 links, nothing here touches their servers, so what you’re paying for is permission.

Cap Pro, $12 per user per month

It’s $8.16 if you pay yearly, and this is the plan that looks like Loom.

You get unlimited cloud storage and bandwidth for share links, plus AI-generated titles, summaries, chapters and transcripts. You can use a custom domain like cap.yourcompany.com, password-protect shares, see viewer analytics and set up team workspaces. There’s also a Loom importer to move your old videos over.

You also get the compliance badges: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA.

This is where the real business is. Every feature in this list costs Cap money per user, in storage, egress, transcription and inference, and the subscription pays for that.

Enterprise, Pro price plus add-ons

Enterprise has the same features as Pro, at the Pro price, with two optional add-ons. SAML SSO is a flat $199 a month, and a signed BAA is $99 a month. You turn both on from the dashboard. SCIM provisioning and volume discounts are available if you ask.

There’s no sales call and no minimum seat count, but the buyer is still different. It’s a company that needs SSO and a BAA before it can install anything.

There is also a developer API, billed by usage: about $0.05 per minute recorded and $0.001 per minute stored per month. It’s not on the main pricing page, but it’s a fifth revenue line.

Why giving away the code doesn’t kill the business

The whole thing is public. You can clone the repo and run docker compose up -d, and you have your own Cap Web with MySQL, MinIO and the media server. Point the desktop app at it from Settings, and you get share links with no 5-minute limit and no subscription.

So why does anyone pay? There are three reasons, and each one is a deliberate choice.

The license is split in two

The LICENSE file in the repo splits the code in two.

The capture crates, the ones named cap-camera* and scap-*, are MIT. Anyone can take them and use them in anything, including closed source products. Everything else is AGPLv3.

The MIT part spreads the project. Other Rust developers pick up the capture code, contribute fixes, and talk about Cap.

The AGPL part protects the product. AGPL says that if you modify Cap and run it as a service for other people, you have to publish your changes. That removes the scenario where a competitor takes the web app, rebrands it, and sells it as a hosted service. They could, but they’d have to open source their work too.

AGPL also makes a lot of companies nervous. Many corporate legal teams don’t allow AGPL code inside the building. That nervousness pushes them toward the paid plan, where the question doesn’t come up.

I wrote about the GPL family of licenses here if you want the background.

The commercial license covers the binary, not the code

This is a detail I almost missed.

The commercial license applies only to the app you download from cap.so. Their docs say explicitly that it doesn’t apply to versions you build yourself from source.

So if you build it yourself, it’s free. If you download the official build and use it at work, it’s $29 a year.

Almost nobody builds a Rust and Tauri app from source to save $29. Cap can’t really enforce the license, and it still works.

Self-hosting is offered, and it’s a lot of work

Self-hosting is real, but look at what you’re running: a Next.js app, a media server doing FFmpeg work, MySQL, MinIO, a reverse proxy with SSL, backups for two volumes. The AI features need your own API keys for transcription and a language model. The docs also say they don’t offer support for self-hosted deployments.

That’s a lot for a screen recorder. Most teams will look at that list and pay $8 a month.

Most customers will never self-host. The option is there so they know they could, and that’s what “you own your data” means in practice. Knowing the exit exists makes the hosted plan easier to trust, even for people who never use it.

I did the same exercise on Plausible when I read the Community Edition code. It’s the same pattern there. Self-hosting is real, the hosted plan is real, and most people choose the hosted plan.

The 5-minute limit lives in open source code

The 5-minute limit on free share links is enforced in code you can read. When the desktop app uploads a recording, the web app checks your plan and the duration. If you’re not on Pro and the video is longer than 5 minutes, it answers upgrade_required, and the desktop app opens the upgrade window. Both sides of that check are on GitHub.

In a closed source app you can’t get around a limit like this. In Cap you can remove it with a fork, or by self-hosting the web app. Cap ships it anyway, because the people who fork it were never going to pay.

I think that’s the right way to look at it. A free tier doesn’t need to be impossible to bypass, as long as paying is easier than bypassing it.

Who they are positioned against

Every sentence on the pricing page is aimed at Loom.

Loom Business is $18 per user per month, and Cap Pro is $8.16 on the yearly plan. Loom keeps your videos, while Cap lets you connect your own S3 bucket or Google Drive. Cap’s desktop app also works offline, and Cap built a Loom importer so switching costs nothing.

Open source is the marketing channel for all of this. It’s why developers try Cap, tweet about it and star the repo, and twenty thousand stars is a lot of free distribution.

The compliance work (SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA) lets Cap sell to companies that would never install a random open source tool. That’s the enterprise money, and a solo developer can’t copy it.

What we know about the company

Cap Software, Inc. was founded by Richie McIlroy, based in Liverpool. He raised a pre-seed round to work on it full time. In mid-2025 he described the team as four people, fully remote. The repo uses Algora bounties to pay outside contributors for specific issues.

In June 2026 he posted an 82.8% month-over-month growth rate and said SOC 2 Type II was about to land. He doesn’t publish revenue, so I’d describe the size as early and growing, not big.

The pricing page says early-adopter prices are locked in for the lifetime of the subscription. That’s a signal prices will go up.

What I would copy

Now the selfish part. I don’t have a team, I don’t raise money, and I like it that way. I wrote about keeping a business small years ago and still believe it.

Here’s what from Cap’s model fits that constraint.

The first is free for personal use, paid for work. This is the cheapest paywall there is. There’s no feature gating and no infrastructure, only one sentence in a license file and a $29 checkout. The people who use your tool at a company have a card and an expense process. The people who use it at home don’t, and they were never going to pay anyway, so let them use it.

Then I’d license the binary, not the code. If I released a desktop tool, I’d copy this exactly: source on GitHub under AGPL, and the official build behind a small yearly fee for commercial use. The build is what you sell, and the source is how people find it.

I’d also use MIT for the parts I want to spread and AGPL for the product. Cap’s capture crates are useful to anyone writing a screen recorder, so those are MIT. The thing you’d sell is AGPL. The rule is clean. The reusable library is free for everyone, and the finished product has strings attached.

Pick one incumbent and price against it. Cap positioned itself as “Loom, but $8 instead of $18, and you own your data”, instead of as “a screen recorder”. Every feature decision, from the importer to the custom S3 support, follows from that one sentence. If I were building a tool, I’d want to name the incumbent on my pricing page too.

Finally, make the cheap tier yearly instead of lifetime. The Desktop License is $29 per year, not $29 forever. Small recurring revenue from a lot of people is more stable than one-time payments. I’ve written about recurring vs one-time revenue before, and Cap picks the recurring side even for a license that costs them nothing to deliver.

I’ve been on the other side of this too. When I made all my software free, it was because charging $20 per project added ceremony and nobody bought. Cap’s answer to the same problem is different: keep everything free to try, and charge only the people who have a business reason to pay. I think that’s the better answer when the product is something people run every day.

What I would not copy

I’d skip the compliance stack. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA with signed BAAs take months, a lot of money, and someone whose job is to maintain them. They only pay off if you sell to companies large enough to ask, and most indie products never will.

I wouldn’t promise unlimited cloud storage and bandwidth either. You can promise “unlimited” when you have funding and a growth curve to justify it. Video is the most expensive thing to store and serve. As a solo developer I would price storage, or push people to their own S3 bucket, which Cap also supports.

Enterprise sales are out too. “Talk to sales” means someone answers the phone, writes proposals, negotiates SLAs and fills out security questionnaires. That’s a job. If you’re one person, it’s your job, and you stop building.

The last one is free self-hosting with no support. This works for Cap because the hosted plan is cheap and the self-host path is painful. If your product is easy to self-host, the same move eats your revenue. Plausible handles this by letting the Community Edition lag behind the hosted version. Cap handles it by making self-hosting a real infrastructure project. You need one of the two.

The pattern in one sentence

Give away the client and the code. Charge for hosting, AI, compliance, and the right to use it at work. Use AGPL so nobody can resell your hosted version.

It’s the same shape as Plausible, Cal.com and Ghost. Open source brings adoption and trust, the hosted plan pays the bills, and the license protects the hosted plan.

What makes Cap worth studying is the $29 tier. It’s the one piece of the model that needs no servers, no team and no funding. You need a license file, and the bet that most people would rather pay a small amount than build a Rust app from source.

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