TechEquity RAD · A Partnership Proposal for Open-Source Software Vendors
Your Software.
In Production.
In Twenty Minutes.
A distribution channel that turns an interested engineer
into someone who has actually run your product properly.
Your open-source edition is the best marketing you have — but only for the people who get it
running. Between "this looks like what we need" and "we have operated it on real
infrastructure" sits a self-hosting exercise that quietly disqualifies most of your pipeline.
RAD removes that step. One click deploys your software on Google Cloud with a managed
database, TLS, secrets and identity already wired — and hands the result to the person
evaluating you.
190+ Applications Listed
Upstream Stays Canonical
25% Revenue Share
No Listing Fee
190+
Applications in the catalogue
151
Composed into solutions
~20min
Interest to running
The hardest part of open-source adoption was never the licence. It was the first hour.
Your Funnel Does Not Leak at the Top.
It Leaks at the First Hour.
Open-core companies rarely have an awareness problem. What they have is a conversion problem
located at a very specific point: the moment an interested engineer has to stand the software
up themselves. Everything before that step is marketing you have already paid for. Everything
after it is a sales conversation you have already earned.
The laptop trial
A container on a developer machine proves the interface, not the
product. No managed database, no TLS, no identity integration, no backups. The
evaluator sees your UI and learns nothing about whether your software fits their estate —
which is the only question their organisation is actually asking.
The self-host filter
Self-hosting friction selects for the wrong users. The teams
that push through it are the ones with a platform function already — precisely the ones
least likely to need your supported edition. The teams who would pay for support are the
teams who give up at step four of the install guide.
The confidence gap
The enterprise conversation starts from zero. When nobody
in the buying organisation has operated your software at production shape, the paid-edition
discussion is about risk rather than value — and procurement resolves risk by choosing the
incumbent.
The unreachable market
Whole regions cannot transact with you. Not because the
engineers are absent or uninterested, but because the payment rails your checkout depends
on are not the ones they use.
Cloud marketplaces solve a different problem. A hyperscaler marketplace listing
reaches people who are already that cloud's customers, already hold a corporate card, and are
already in a buying motion. It is a procurement channel, and a good one. It does almost nothing
for the engineer who has not yet formed an opinion about your software — which is where an
open-core funnel is actually won.
What the evaluator experiences, in each case
| | Laptop container | Their own cloud, by hand | Via RAD |
|---|
| Time to running | Minutes | Days | ~20 minutes |
| Managed database | No | Yes | Yes |
| TLS, secrets, identity | No | Yes | Yes |
| Resembles production | No | Yes | Yes |
| Needs a platform engineer | No | Yes | No |
| Survives into real use | No | Yes | Yes — it is their project |
"Their own cloud, by hand" is the outcome you want; it is simply the one most evaluators never reach.
A First-Class Deployment
You Did Not Have to Build or Maintain.
RAD deploys your published open-source edition onto Google Cloud as reviewed Terraform — Cloud
Run or GKE, with the managed services around it already configured. The evaluator gets your
software running the way you would want it demonstrated, in a Google Cloud project they own.
Step 01
They find your product
In the catalogue, or inside a solution alongside tools they already use.
Step 02
One deployment
Into their own Google Cloud project, or a managed one if they have no account yet.
Step 03
A real evaluation
Production-shaped, with their own data, on infrastructure they control.
Step 04
Your conversation
Support, scale and compliance — with someone who has already run it.
Four things this gives you
- A production-shaped trial as the default experience. Not a sandbox, not a hosted demo with your branding on someone else's tenancy — their cloud, their data, their control.
- Adjacency, not just search. 151 of the catalogue's applications appear inside 74 pre-composed solutions, where a whole working stack deploys as one unit. Your software gets adopted as part of a system somebody wanted, rather than found by someone who already knew your name.
- Automatic service-to-service wiring. When your product is deployed alongside a database, a search cluster or an identity provider, the real endpoints and credentials are written into its configuration as the deployment advances. The evaluator never hits the integration step that ends most trials.
- Zero maintenance burden on you. RAD authors and maintains the Terraform. You do not take on a deployment surface, an issue queue, or a support channel you did not ask for.
Upstream stays canonical
RAD does not fork your project, repackage it under another name, or modify your licence.
It deploys your published artefacts. Your repository stays the source of truth, your release
cadence is unchanged, and your brand is presented as yours.
You are in known company
34 recognised open-core projects are already in the catalogue — across
developer tooling, analytics, identity, collaboration, service management and AI.
Open-core projects already deployable through RAD
Grafana
Metabase
Superset
Keycloak
Elasticsearch
Gitea
Directus
Strapi
n8n
Matomo
Ghost
Nextcloud
Mattermost
Odoo
Zammad
Documenso
Plane
Appsmith
Outline
Supabase
Temporal
Penpot
Element
RAGFlow
Cal
EspoCRM
Snipe-IT
Uptime Kuma
+ 148 more applications
Where This Shows Up in Your Numbers
Six Places a Distribution Channel
Moves an Open-Core Business.
Every open-core company runs the same machine: free users at the top, a paid edition at the
bottom, and a set of constraints in between that decide how much gets through. RAD acts on six
of those constraints at once — and on the two that are hardest to move with spending alone.
Trial volume
More people actually reach a running instance. The
first-hour barrier is removed, so interest converts into evaluation instead of into a
bookmark. Every one is a real deployment on real infrastructure — a signal worth far more
than a download count, because it cannot be produced by accident.
Trial quality
The evaluation resembles the thing they would buy.
Managed database, TLS, secrets and identity are already in place, so the trial answers
"does this fit our estate?" rather than "does the interface look right?". A demo that
resembles production is the one that survives a technical review.
Conversion
Your sales conversation starts further along. When the
buyer's own engineers have already operated the software, the paid-edition discussion is
about support, compliance, scale and indemnity — the things you charge for — instead of
about whether it works at all. Risk-led evaluations default to the incumbent;
experience-led ones do not.
Cost of acquisition
Distribution you do not pay for per lead. Catalogue
presence, placement inside composed solutions and community workshops are not media spend.
Adjacency in particular reaches people who were not searching for you — the
hardest and most expensive audience to buy.
Market coverage
New geographies without a go-to-market. No local entity,
no local sales team, no new payment integration on your side. Regions and payment rails
you cannot currently serve become reachable through a channel that already serves them.
Channel capacity
People who can implement your software, created at someone
else's expense. Enterprise open source is gated on practitioners, not on
awareness. Each community cohort produces engineers able to deploy and support your
product — the constraint that usually caps how fast a paid edition can grow.
A seventh, quieter one: support load
A large share of community support traffic is misconfigured self-hosting rather than
defects in your software. A reviewed, standardised deployment removes that class of issue
before it reaches your forum, your issue tracker or your maintainers' evenings.
And evidence, before you commit headcount
Aggregate deployment and geography reporting shows where your product is actually being
adopted — useful input for deciding which region, vertical or integration deserves
investment next, ahead of hiring against a guess.
Two of these cannot be bought with budget. You can spend your way to more
trials and more awareness. You cannot spend your way to a market whose payment rails reject
you, and you cannot spend your way to a population of engineers who already know how to run
your software. Those are the two RAD is built to move.
Whichever stage your project is at
Early — seeking adoption
You have a strong product and a small audience. RAD puts it in front of engineers who
were looking for the capability, not for your name, and gives them a way to try it
that does not depend on your install guide being perfect.
Established — seeking conversion
You have plenty of community users and not enough of them convert. RAD changes what a
trial actually is, so more of your funnel arrives at the paid conversation having operated
the software properly.
Mature — seeking expansion
You have a working commercial motion in your core markets and no route into the rest.
RAD supplies the regions, the payment rails and the implementation practitioners, without a
local entity or a new field team.
Reach You Do Not Currently Have
Markets Your Checkout Cannot Serve.
Communities Your Marketing Cannot Reach.
This is the part of the proposal that is hardest to replicate and easiest to underestimate. RAD
reaches engineers in places where the barrier to adopting your software has never been interest
or ability — it has been the payment page and the deployment guide.
- Stripe and Flutterwave — card, plus mobile money and local rails across African markets
- An engineer without an internationally accepted card can still transact
- The blocker in these markets is usually the checkout, not the technology
- Eight geographies, including africa-south1 — the only African Google Cloud region
- Middle East, South America, Australia, Asia, Europe and North America
- Latency and data residency stop being reasons not to evaluate
This is a genuinely additive audience. These are not users choosing between
your product and a competitor's. They are users for whom self-hosted open source is the only
viable option at all — and who become your paying customers at exactly the point their
organisation grows enough to need support, compliance and a contract.
The community channel, and why it compounds
30
Real environments per session
RAD provisions a cohort of up to thirty participants in one action — each getting their
own project and their own running deployment, not a shared screen.
1
Session to competence
An attendee leaves a workshop having deployed your software themselves, on real
infrastructure, and knowing what it takes to operate.
∞
Practitioners, afterwards
Those engineers go on to recommend, implement and support your product for the clients
they serve — including on your commercial editions.
Where
RAD is used by technology communities — including Google Developer
Group chapters and similar practitioner networks — which run regular meetups,
seminars and hands-on training. These events need one thing above all: an exercise that
works reliably for thirty people at once, on real infrastructure.
What we propose
Your product as the featured hands-on exercise in a
community session, with a lab guide we build alongside you. You supply the expertise and
the reference architecture; we supply the environments, the trainers and the audience.
Why it compounds
The scarce input in enterprise open-source sales is not awareness —
it is people who can run your software. Every cohort produces some. They
become the implementation channel that makes your paid edition buyable in accounts where
you have no field presence at all.
An engineer who has deployed your software is worth more to you than a thousand who
have read about it. They can recommend it with authority, implement it without help,
and support it afterwards — and they cost you nothing to create, because the training
organisation and the community are already paying to run the event.
Four Ways to Work Together.
None of Them Cost You Anything to Start.
There is no listing fee, no exclusivity, and no change to how you build or licence your
software. Each step below is independently useful — most partners begin at the first and move
along it as the evidence accumulates.
- We author and maintain the module
- Your branding, your docs linked
- Nothing for you to operate
- You sign off the reference architecture
- Carries a vendor-verified badge
- Deployed as you would deploy it
- Placed in relevant solutions
- Wired to complementary tools
- Adopted by adjacency
- Featured in community workshops
- Qualified deployments referred to you
- 25% revenue share
- A first-class Google Cloud deployment of your software, built and maintained at no cost to you
- Evaluators who arrive at your sales conversation having already operated the product
- Reach into markets your payment rails and regions currently exclude
- A pipeline of trained practitioners who can implement and support your commercial editions
- 25% of the platform revenue your module generates
- Aggregate deployment and geography reporting — evidence of where your demand actually is
- Permission to list your open-source edition under your name and marks
- A technical review of the reference architecture, so it is deployed as you intend
- A route for us to escalate a genuine product issue found by a deployer
- Willingness to be featured in a community workshop, where it suits you
Not asked for: exclusivity, a licence change, engineering time to build
the deployment, or any commitment before you have seen it working.
01
See yours deployed
We will build a reference deployment of your software and show it to you before you commit to anything.
sales@techequity.cloud →
02
Run a joint workshop
Your product as the hands-on exercise for a community cohort, with environments provided.
Propose a session →
03
Look at the catalogue
See how comparable open-core projects are presented, before we discuss yours.
radmodules.dev →