One more thing: I can only assume you have looked at Payload. How are they able to avoid all these complications? They have an MIT license, and don’t have any small org tiers etc. They charge for enterprise only.
Is it because the paid features are closed source? So they can have the rest under MIT?
They also might be losing money (and getting bought by Figma gave them the money to lose money for a few more years before changing the pricing)?
I certainly don’t know what’s happening at Payload behind closed doors, but I can confidently say that them being acquired by Figma essentially means they don’t have to worry about runway, financing, or profitably.
It also means they have far less overhead, because under a larger corp’s umbrella, they don’t need to pay for the HR, finance, legal, operations side of things. Since that would all be covered under Figma.
Figma could run payload at a loss indefinitely and not worry about fundraising, so it’s not really a model we can follow.
Busy times, so I’ll keep this response short…
From what I can tell in your message, your organization is well within the limits to use our platform completely free, including all features and with no limits. Our Grant is designed to give projects like yours free access to our platform.
I think that’s fair.
I’m sorry to hear that providing basic telemetry or registration confirmation might be tricky in your location, but unfortunately we can’t work around international sanctions and every possible use case.
All of our tiers still include custom RBAC. We are limiting advanced filters in some tiers, but it’s still completely available and unlimited through our grant for all individuals and small orgs.
I understand if you disagree with this decision, but we have tried an open core model in the past and only selling professional services and premium extensions. It didn’t work. We could not have hit profitability under that model, and the project would cease to exist.
We’ll have a more thorough description of the “competition” in the MSCL soon… so keep an eye out for that.
Hi There
We are a small agency who has a few clients who’s revenue or total income exceeds $5M (based on our assumption, it is not the question we’d like to ask our clients). However most of these clients pay us a small retainer fee to manage their sites (which are also comparatively small sites in most cases). Our revenue is under $5m and headcount under 50.
Some of these are new sites, others are existing on free-tier of other cloud-based cms.
The question here is. If we are opting for directus open-source, self hosted solution. Who’s revenue counds for the BSL to new MSCL. Is it our client ($5m + 50+ employees) or is it us (under $5m and under 50 staff).
This question has been asked a few times on different social platforms, on Reddit and haven’t gotten a clear response on it yet hence. Something we wanted to check on before we choose to use Directus for such client cases.
Thanks
Hi @Mustafa ! It will work the same under MSCL as it has under BSL before; it’s counted against the end user of Directus. End user there means the person or people that have a studio seat in Directus; eg the people that are actively logging in and using the Directus studio to read, create, and manage data. In this case if your client is the one logging in to and using your Directus instance, it’s indeed measured against their team. The reason we added the seat count alongside the revenue is to solve the painpoint you called out: folks might not know the revenue of the end user of the project. In this case it should be easier to retrieve or make a realistic educated guess about your client’s team size than revenue 
Hey there, I have read through most of the thread but could not find a clear answer. I am still a bit confused on the term headcount. You mentioned in one comment it means the “full legal entity” or the “entire org” and mentioned that huge non-profits like Red Cross get discounts but do not qualify for the grant. What about smaller non-profits? Do all registered members of a non-profit organisation count towards the headcount? Or only active volunteers? Or only board members? Also, how does the term headcount translate to other countries?
As an example, I am a volunteer at a German non-profit organisation (“eingetragener Verein”) and we use Directus to manage our members and also event sign-ups (also for external non-members). The users actually use a custom frontend that communicates with the Directus API. The actual Directus studio is only used by a few admins (<5). All other users (~1,500) do not have App/Studio access. Our club has ~700 registered members, ~50 of which are active volunteers and 6 are on the board (“Vorstand”) and we have one paid half-time secretary for the club office (“Geschäftsstelle”). Our total yearly revenue is ~50,000 € (with only a little bit of surplus for reserves). That is just 1 % of the financial threshold, but depending on how headcount is defined, we would still exceed the limit after the licence change. So would we qualify for the grant?
The Free Business Tier without custom RBAC is not really useful as that is an essential feature.
Hi @rijkvanzanten
Team and user count aren’t the same. we have a product on Directus with +15.000 basic users, +50 tenant admin users and 2 admin users. but our team is under 10 and either we and our customers (tenant admins) have less than $5M yearly revenue/fund. we are creating user for customers of our customers so they can log in to our app (not directus studio) with our directus RBAC and authentication.
I think you are very wrong about how we use directus…
Team and user count aren’t the same
I know! That’s why historically we’ve priced against seats and not just all users. We’ve explicitly defined between “seats” as users who use the Directus studio for that exact reason 
I think you are very wrong about how we use directus…
Not hearing anything out of the ordinary so far It’s very common to have a lower number of Directus Seats that are used as administrative / content editorial users for your product, and then thousands of “API users” that are the individual users of your project.
I work for a fortune 50 company and spent the last 6 years building out an enterprise application in Directus. You would think that working for a very large corp would have unlimited budget but that’s not how very large corps work. I work on a team that has a very limited budget, despite the application being widely used. This corp will not fork over $6 grand a year to use what was open source a month ago, for a small team. Even though we work under the umbrella of this massive company we have strict budgets and resources.
Unfortunately this now means we have to do a giant undertaking in converting our backend away from Directus. Very disappointed.
Honestly, that sounds like a budget issue to me. Or not realizing enough value out of the platform. The value is there if you need it/harness it.
There not a single thing that make sense in this new licencing system.
There’s no way I can sell this to a client, ever. At that cost.
I would have gladly pushed for a paid MCP extension : pay X and you will be able to use your admin through Claude sounds valuable.
Paying 500$ to be able to have only 3 admins sounds like a scam.
Who decided the price ?
Do you realise that for 500$ (600 if paid monthly), I can have three Claude Max x20 ?
Wordpress is free, Drupal is free, Nuxt, Vue, React are free, they offer paid features, mostly for developper convenience.
Directus just locked all it’s value behind an absurdly high fee…
I really loved the product and have been working for a year to push it to clients as a Wordpress replacement. One year I’ve been working on a stack with tools to create website fast for my clients. I’ve even worked on a very polished extension to manage permalinks across several collections, something really missing from Directus. So now I have an open sourced, free extension that brings value to a paid, highy paywall locked platform that I wont ever be able to sell
Thanks for the response. So as you mentioned, it is the headcount of the end users’ company that are have user accounts to create , manage content that is counted.
In our case, if our client doesn’t even have a directus account, and we a small agency with less than 10 headcount and less than $5m revenue are handling all content for them, is it then our headcount against which it will be measure? I believe that is thay case based on your definition? Could you or someone from the team confirm please thanks .
Correct! If your end clients aren’t in the studio (just your team) and your team is under the threshold, then that is the free grant!
Nope. Self-hosted was not free before. That’s literally why we’re making this change, people misunderstood how things worked in the previous license+grant setup.
If you’re under the threshold, it’s free, and if you’re over, it’s paid… That hasn’t changed, just been clarified.
There’s no paywall on admin seats… Just limits on seat counts in general. You can use the free grant with unlimited seats and admins, or you can use the core tier with three seats/admins.
We don’t limit RBAC. It simply has some advanced options unlocked on team. These are not required to secure your project and just add specific filter rules (that you won’t even find in other CMS).
Anyone is welcome to use Drupal or WordPress or any other free software. We are not competing for the same users as them; our goal is more complex data-first use cases.
Who decided the price ?
Do you realise that for 500$ (600 if paid monthly), I can have three Claude Max x20 ?
We did as a company and I signed off on it. Not sure how comparing your AI service fees to an enterprise content platform is related. Our platform is not cost prohibitive. It has far more free options than other proprietary platforms and $500 a month is not as much as you think when it comes to large enterprises.
Paid yes, not paid per collection or flow count. 25 more tables in a db I host myself shouldn’t cost 100$. You are just repeating that the change is just to clarify a situation, and pretend everyone not aligned with that new licencing system was just cheating the honor system…
That sounds silly, so i’ll clarify a few things : I am solo (that’s less that 50 employee), I don’t earn a million dollars, not even 0.1M dollars per year, and my clients are all NGO for now.
But
You changed the licence, went for 3 year before GPL to 4 years before GPL. Changed the price, put arbitrary limits (collection, flow, “seats” whatever that is if not admin users) for a fee that is, believe it or not, massivelly rejected. You say RBAC isn’t limited, but Directus 11 has per field control
I am starting this week a project for a startup, we changed to Strapi last minute, because they can’t understand they need to pay 100$ every time we need a few more collections.
I’m not going to compare to Claude then, so let’s compare to Strapi : 45$ for features unlocking, not to have higher limits.
I really love Directus, but this is a move in the wrong direction. Let us build with full core features : flow, collection,s RBAC. Make us pay for insights, MCP, multi tenancies, whatever.
Hi Ben,
In the Terms of Service for the Open Innovation Grant Licence Agreement, we can read in “Eligibility” the following assertion:
(iii) Grantee is the end user of the Directus Solution and is not reselling the Directus Solution or building on top of it to provide products or services for third parties.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to prevent small agencies (the end user?) to configure and use the Directus instance for the client (the third party?).
Thanks in advance for your clarifications!
Kind regards
This is interesting. I was also under the impression that we’re free to build a SaaS on the “Open Innovation Grant Licence Agreement” but that doesn’t play well with “(iii) Grantee is the end user of the Directus Solution and is not … building on top of it to provide products or services for third parties.”
Please tell me the headcount for the grant does not include external SaaS users?
Could you clarify this for the SaaS case as well,@ben? I was so confident in this 3 months ago but I guess I missed this line 
I think the community feedback request here is really important, especially since licensing changes can significantly impact adoption and contribution patterns.
A few things worth considering in this discussion:
Clarity on use cases: The existing license has enabled a lot of smaller projects and agencies to build on Directus without friction. If there’s a revision, it’d be helpful to understand which specific scenarios the new terms are targeting. Are there particular commercial models that prompted this, or is it more about protecting the core project long-term.
Migration path concerns: If this affects existing implementations, there should be a clear grace period and communication timeline. I’ve seen other projects handle this poorly, and it creates unnecessary friction with their user base. Transparency about “what changes, when, and for whom” prevents a lot of goodwill damage.
Fork and contribution incentives: Open source projects live or die based on community contributions. Make sure any licensing revision doesn’t accidentally create perverse incentives that push maintainers toward forking or reduce contributions from smaller shops who can’t afford legal review.
Dual licensing option: Have the maintainers considered a dual licensing approach if commercial restrictions are the goal. That’s been effective for projects like Qt and Elasticsearch—lets different user segments coexist without everyone being locked into one model.
I’d genuinely like to see what the proposed changes actually are before forming a stronger opinion. Posting the draft text (even if rough) would probably generate more constructive feedback than abstract discussion about licensing philosophy.
Wow, you are late to the party my friend. Did you write this based on only the first post or was that the only think ChatGPT could fetch? Most of your questions have been answered or pretty much too late to ask. The change is already in effect.