How to secure your product and which sales model to choose?

Question

CMS

Good afternoon. The crux of the matter is this. We wrote our own CMS (script) with different goodies. There are already those who want to buy, foreign buyers, but then the question of safety and sales model arose.
Initially, they were going to take a fixed one-time fee and transfer the copy to the owner’s hands, but at the end of writing the script and discussing security (encoding) and licensing with a partner, a holivar began on how to secure your product from draining open access. The question of the sales model itself also arose. They say okay once we take the money, but the product will develop and the work will continue already for the idea, so the idea has disappeared.
At the moment, we are more inclined towards the SaaS model. Own hosting, limited access to files (let's just say a template via FTP) and a monthly subscription to different plans. Thus, the product will not be merged, and it seems that money for development is dripping. But this model does not suit me very much. Therefore, I wanted to know the community, if there are those who sell their products, please share your experience.
How to secure your product and which sales model to choose?

Answer 1

Do Open Source and take money for support. Here are the benefits:
1) You will earn on a subscription;
2) Your system will be studied and developed by third party developers;
3) You will be contacted for improvements and "finishing" the functionality.
If you want to sell your system one-time, then you can protect it and come up with tricky models of restrictions. If you want to make money on it all the time, you need to create a community that is interested in the development of the system.
If the niche is narrow, then you can thus immediately capture the market and monopolize it.