Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.
My two examples are of OS SaaS that got their plug pulled before they got to that stage. See skiff.com and omnivore.
I’m not familiar with either of those projects or what you mean by “that stage”, but why can’t you and the community around them just fork them and continue development in a way that you prefer? What’s stopping you?
There are various obstacles to “just forking” a project; it requires times to understand the frameworks / libraries used in the project, understand the code and its different parts and last but not least, have a interest to invest that time and energy (most often, that time could be spent developing your own solution that would fit your usecase better).
As for the stage I was referring to, both the theories of enshittification and rot-economy see software and services going through stages to attract new users, before going in for the profit maximizing.