$299 and You Own the Chat
37signals just sold you Campfire — not a seat, not a tier, not a "plan" — the whole thing.
the ONCE model proved the thesis. campfire went MIT open source in august 2025 — even more radical than $299. 37signals hit $80M revenue, stayed profitable at 80 employees. the protection racket observation aged well.
37signals put Campfire up for sale today. Not "sign up for a free trial." Not "contact sales for enterprise pricing." You pay $299, you get the software, you run it yourself, forever. That's the whole deal.
This is the ONCE line — their thesis that the SaaS model is a protection racket dressed up as convenience. You don't own anything. You rent access to your own company's conversations, and the price goes up every time the VC board needs a better multiple. Slack went from scrappy startup chat to $7.25 per user per month to getting acquired by Salesforce, which is a sentence that should make everyone feel something.
DHH has been making this argument for years in various forms, but selling the code outright is the argument made concrete. You can look at it. You can run it on hardware you control. It doesn't call home.
The thing is, this is the same current running under the open weights moment — Llama, Mistral, all of it. Something shifted. People got tired of renting their own tools from landlords who could raise the price or kill the product on a board decision. The model weights are yours. The chat server is yours. The vibe, if you want to put it that way, is ownership.
Campfire isn't going to eat Slack's lunch. Slack has enterprise lock-in so deep it would take an act of God and three quarters of IT budget negotiations to dislodge it. But that's not really the point. The point is that the alternative exists, it's priced like software used to be priced, and more people than expected seem to want it.
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