Let me be honest: When I saw the pricing of Stack Exchange, I went "WTF?". But then again: I am not a business, I am an individual. So if you Open Source SO, then that would allow people on the low end who would not be customers otherwise to become customers.

I am perfectly willing to setup my own SO on my own Server, well knowing that the whole thing is not going to be as good as your hosting, but for my free site it would be good enough. So no harm to the business plan there. Even as you may lose some people who would be interested in the small plan, I think that overall I don't see much of a problem.

BUT I see a problem at the other end of the spectrum: Self-Hosting is $2500 per month per server, or 30000$ a year per server. As we would need our own admins anyway to set it up, the "real" and "open source" versions would not make much difference - apart from the 30k$. This might hurt you.

And then there is the thing you mentioned on the podcast: What prevents hosters from adding SO to their portfolio? SO is a big brand in IT now, but you're also aiming outside of IT. I'm not sure if that works.

I don't think that an Open Source SO and the StackExchange pricing can co-exist, but then again I am not a business-man, so maybe I'm missing something.

Wordpress is a bit of a different example: They have free hosting, but they charge for stuff like changing your themes or making certain changes. So they are making tiny amounts of money from people who want care-free hosting, but they have a LOT of people to make tiny amounts from.