“there's essentially zero barrier to entry we have people coming to our project every day looking at it either contributing to it running it for their small teams or then seeing the open source project and converting actually to papermark.com because they don't want to deal with the self-hosting of it”

Open source self-host tier converts to paid when ops friction kicks in

By letting anyone self-host for free, Papermark removed the purchase decision entirely at the top of the funnel. Users who hit the operational overhead of running their own instance naturally upgraded to the paid hosted tier — creating a self-qualifying conversion path that cost nothing to run.