Recap of the new licence for the youngsters?

General
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I’m a time traveller coming from early Middle Age Europe. Over here we are not that familiar with licences, grants, and turnovers in billions. We still do business in the old way: if we grow, we use our own money to grow even further instead of turning to investors who will end up holding us by the neck. But I understand that’s how it works over there in Silicon Valley, so I respect the decisions you have taken about the new Directus licence. :money_mouth_face:

I have upgraded v12 locally and have already seen the surprise: max 25 collections and many more restrictions. I just have one question: can I still use my selfhosted Directus for a marketplace business that only feeds me and my cat, or I must look for another solution?

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At least for me, especially the new tier just looks like cosmetics. Any project that does more than the most simple things will quickly exceed the limits. For example, my CMS functionality alone already consists of more than 50 collections, many of them just junction tables used for translations or editor nodes.

Plus, you can’t use much touted features like the new AI translations. And putting such features in the “Enterprise” tier irritates me, I think at least some months down the road I would consider this as standard, nothing special.

So yeah, you are not the only one thinking really hard right now if directus is still the right platform … also the whole communication is lacking, I also asked about telemetry in another thread, and got no answers no far.

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…Thought so :expressionless_face: anything would go a lot beyond the 50 collections. About the AI, I was thinking to install a local AI, but I guess it’s a waste of energy.

So in the end, this is yet another story of a products marketed as “free forever” but suddenly needs “donations” in order to survive.. right when they receive huge funds from investors.

The first thing I was taught at business school is: never use funds to pay wages.

4

Sorry for the delayed response!

If you are running a hobby project, your individual project, or building something for an organization under $5m annual revenue and less than 50 employees, you qualify for the OIG.

OIG = fully free and unlimited Directus (seats, flows, collections, etc.).

All we ask is that you register via a quick 30 second form to attain a license key. The only cost associated with this is if you’d like us to host it via Directus Cloud, in which is $99/mo. As part of that we also provide the Cloud dashboard, which is a one-stop shop to manage multiple projects, billing, logs, user management, and more.

We’ve had hundreds of OIG license keys already distributed within the last week.

Core is our first “commercial” tier of Directus (as in anyone would only use these tiers if the project they’re building is for an entity that is larger than the $5m / 50 stipulation). It is intended for limited projects (which is why it has limited seats, collections, and flows) and for POCs. It’s free and only requires $99/mo if you’d like us to host it for you in Directus Cloud with the aforementioned dashboard.

These are the first two places we recommend anyone start.

If you are over the $5m / 50 stipulation, yes we do either limit your usage or require you to contribute back to the continued development and growth of Directus. We are trying to build something sustainable for everyone.

Simply put, this is a clarification of our previous BSL license, which in many ways was an honor box system that a lot of users/orgs were taking advantage of.

As stated by our founder Ben in multiple threads, we’re on a clear path to profitability, so I’m not really sure what you mean about needing “donations in order to survive.”

To be fully transparent, this is what we’re actually trying to balance:

  • Keeping the platform free for the vast majority of users,
  • Building something that can hold up for enterprise customers,
  • and paying a full-time team a fair wage to do it.

Those three things don’t naturally coexist, and we’re doing it without selling to Figma or Salesforce, raising hundreds of millions of VC funds (we raised a $7m series A back in 2022), or going totally closed-source.

So far, the users having the most trouble adapting to the license change are the users that are actually above the $5m / 50 threshold and weren’t following the terms of our previous BSL license, and we totally get the frustration if it feels like a rug has been pulled.

If that’s you, we’re happy to chat more about your situation if you want to give us a shout.

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I think you may miss an important point. It is NOT about eligible users, it is about agencies and developers using directus for client projects. Fact is: a lot of companies with over $5M don’t earn a lot. All those small businesses and startups may have high costs, but relatively low return. Fact is: such companies typically WON’T be able and/or willing to pay north of let’s say 100$ or 200$ / month ONLY for a CMS license. Plus, since directus is not a complete product but rather a kind of high level framework, all the actual work has to be done on top. So how to justify this cost especially if your company is coming from WP and looking for alternatives? Plus, if you reach this price region you are also in a whole different ballpark regarding your competition. To put it blunty, I as such a company owner would laugh at my agency trying to sell me something like this, especially if I know the market. So, is directus REALLY worth it at such costs (plus all the uncertainity) for such companies? I like the product, but it is far beyond from being perfect (in fact I stumbled about a LOT of bugs, UI oddities and outright badly implemented features, like flows).

1 Like
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Fact is: a lot of companies with over $5M don’t earn a lot. All those small businesses and startups may have high costs, but relatively low return.

Not sure I understand your point here - you’re saying that organizations shouldn’t have to pay for tool/software that they get value from or that solves a specific problem because they’re spending so much money on other tools/software? Or that our stipulations are wrong? If the latter, what would you suggest?

Plus, since directus is not a complete product but rather a kind of high level framework, all the actual work has to be done on top. So how to justify this cost especially if your company is coming from WP and looking for alternatives?

Totally get the framework vs. out-of-the-box question, but that’s sort of the beauty of Directus, is it not? We built it unopinionated from the start, so technical teams can use it to scaffold for any use cases. We don’t lock you into it just a content management system.

We have world class resorts using it for on-resort activity management and guest registration, hotels using it for room booking and reservation systems, major airlines using it for internal messaging systems, and tons of other use cases.

With the native MCP or AI Assistant, you can quickly scaffold out any data model in minutes, scoped down to fit core tier maximums as the POC, and then have your client decide if it makes sense to move forward with the more comprehensive build.

Fact is: such companies typically WON’T be able and/or willing to pay north of let’s say 100$ or 200$ / month ONLY for a CMS license. Plus, if you reach this price region you are also in a whole different ballpark regarding your competition.

It depends - we’ve heard of some very, very high CMS subscription costs for other tools (like…3-5x our enterprise costs). But we also expect the majority of our users will fall into the OIG tier as well. Or won’t need a hefty Directus instance for a simple, light CMS (which would easily fall into our Core tier collections and seat-wise.)

So, is directus REALLY worth it at such costs (plus all the uncertainity) for such companies? I like the product, but it is far beyond from being perfect (in fact I stumbled about a LOT of bugs, UI oddities and outright badly implemented features, like flows).

We certainly think it is, but it sounds like you think otherwise - and that’s okay. We’re doing what we can to constantly improve the product, and we’ve come a long way since v10. If you spot anything in particular our team can tackle, please submit something on Github so our team can fix it in one of our next releases!

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My point is the metric “revenue”, or I also may be missing something, since I am german (where we have “Umsatz” vs “Gewinn”. So please correct me if necessary. So, a lot of smaller companies have high revenue AND high costs, therefore low earnings, therefore constrained budgets, not ABLE to pay $1k per month for directus license alone and ALSO not WILLING to do so even if they had the money, since a LOT of them come from WP (= zero licensing costs, up to maybe 100$ a month with a lot of plugins), and they may have like $100 subscriptions costs for external services like MailChip etc.

So I want to convince such a potential customer that he should use directus with the prospect of having a better CMS, and be also able to unify those external services under one roof.

But - especially since the mid tier is way too restricted - I have to tell him: “well, but then your monthly costs will rise a lot, and I even don’t now how much since we have to ask for it, but I heard it is something like $1000 … a month”

Question: how would you - as the said business owner - react? I hope this made my point more clear. It is just the reality I live in.

PS: already submitted quite a lot of bugs, they were all fixed but still a lingering PR that is not resolved since months. This finally would enable me to use such basic things like search (since my content is JSON based, not HTML). I even am more than willing to submit further stuff, but I also do not willing to waste my time.

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May I step in? I started this topic in order to grab the basics but you are already getting too complicated :upside_down_face:
I live in a country where if your company’s turnover is over 5M then you are among the rich stars, so I reckon that if you are not willing to pay for the software that make your business possible, then you are just a greedy f***k.

My concern is about small companies like mine. I have upgraded locally to V12 and have seen the restrictions already in place.

So, no one has really answered my initial question: can I still use my selfhosted V11 Directus, or upgrading to V12 will expose me to having to pay for it?

Thanks to anyone who can clarify this matter… as they would explain it to a kid.

PS. I also would like some clarifications on the innovation grant. What exactly is? I’m a solopreneur.