For me personally, the past 24 hours since I discovered this thread have been a bit of a rollercoaster of speculation.
I get that… me too, haha. I wish we had waited to release ALL the info at once, but I made the call to start the license chat earlier so we had more time to actually discuss with the community. In hindsight, I wish we had framed the license alongside more insight into tiers/pricing. I (incorrectly) thought our community would assume we would still be doing the right thing… so a lil bummer to see so many people assume the worst in our intentions/plans. But it is what it is.
Missing that drove a lot of the anxiety for me (honestly, my anxiety probably made me miss it). You perhaps should have opened with that, with empasis on “all features” and not just “free”
But I don’t blame you, I missed reading that part.
Yeah, totally my bad. I was too focused on the license part… and have been too close to all this, having worked on it for almost a year now.
Everything you would need to run a multitenant SaaS on Directus should be included in the grant. SSO, full custom RBAC+filters, etc.
The main thing is this:
We’ve learned that big companies will ignore important features if it means they can just use it all for free. We were hoping that SSO, Offline Mode, Premium Support, etc would be enough for large companies to pay for the software. But in reality, they just adapt and use free tiers.
That’s why we have had to really figure out this $5M + 25 HC threshold. It’s the only thing that we can use to force the larger companies to fund the project so we can keep it free for everyone else.
I think $5M is a good number… we’ve had it for 3 years, and it works. I understand why adding ANOTHER threshold is making people nervous, but it’s needed based on what we’ve seen. But, that’s exactly why we’re here discussing… as I think we might look at what that HC number is.
One suggestion for next time: publishing the MSCL text upfront (again, makes sense if you’re asking for feedback) alongside a simple flowchart showing who lands where — paid license, free tier (with feature gating), or Innovation Grant (without) — would have short-circuited a lot of the speculation. The structure makes sense once you understand it, but it wasn’t obvious from the initial announcement.
100% — I appreciate you saying that. I’ve posted a FCL/MSCL diff now, but I agree that a full view of the license and the tiers would have been better. We’ll adjust for this in our main release of info.
I guess this was also to get feedback on how we explain the change… so in that way, this discussion has helped a lot.
The risk that remains is future risk in you changing the license again (always a risk), or restricting the usage grant (new risk). The latter could cause massive headache since “just staying on the current version until we figure out a plan” won’t work in that situation, we don’t know how much of a headsup we’ll have in case of a usage grant change. Again, our goal as a startup is to be able to grow and pay for a license. Only talking about predictability here.
This is VERY valid. It’s frustrating that everyone is talking about how risky it is that we might change our license… because this is always true, for us and everyone else. But I hear you on the grant side. Let me talk with some folks on our side to see if there are any options to make this more predictable long-term.
Again, I sincerely appreciate the constructive chat. Thanks for being part of our community <3