> What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?

Same price for same core feature set would be a good start. Or lower price for smaller feature set.

Having a premium price for a reduced product means your target audience is limited to people willing to pay a premium for a lesser product to support open source. There are some groups willing to do this, but most simply want a tool that does the job without adding too much to their already huge SaaS budget.

I’m extremely sensitive to core workflow tools for a company these days. It only takes a few days of lost work because some tool corrupted your design or the engineers have to spend a few days working around an issue in a tool to make the effective cost of using that tool extremely high.

Engineering time is expensive. If a tool that costs $20 per person per month causes even one issue per month that potentially produces hours of work and rework (like the spontaneously resizing element a commenter above noted) then the true cost is going to be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in lost productivity.