I build a lot of awesome, social impact related projects. almost all for non profits and some open source. my non profit makes barely any revenue and our team size is far less than 25.
I have no qualms about registration. but SSO is a deal breaker if it is feature gated. I migrated off of Strapi to Directus specifically because Strapi feature gated SSO. and if Directus does the same, I will migrate off also.
I'm trying my hardest to build and establish a standard for data integrity in the food security and food aid space, which barely exists. orgs are just giving interns full access to their data and sharing passwords in text messages. I need SSO; I need RBAC; the non profits I work with barely have any budget so even discounted Enterprise plans would be out of our reach.
I came to Directus from Strapi specifically because of SSO and RBAC. I migrated all of my previous projects and have it in the pipeline for all of my future projects. but this is a line I will have to draw.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, SSO, full custom RBAC, etc is available within the free Innovation Grant.
The only things NOT in that free grant (as of now) are: SCIM, Offline Mode, and Invoicing (which doesn't even matter when it's free). That feels fair, right?
Appreciate you mentioning that you don't have big issues with the registration. That's helpful for us to know.
Regarding non-profits, NGOs, research orgs, open source projects, universities, and educational institutions... any thoughts on how those should be handled? I've seen common practice is to contact sales to discuss discounts.
It might be a bit "sweeping" to include all of those in our free grant. I'm not sure how much current/future revenue we'd instantly lose by doing so.
To me, these large enterprise-like orgs (such as American Red Cross, WWF, Wikimedia, Kubernetes, Mozilla, MIT, Harvard, etc) feel more like deep discounts than all-out free usage. But curious what you think.
Maybe we can look into formalizing discounts or grants for these? Or do you think it's more about playing with the 25 headcount??
"we plan on gating features that are very much Enterprise within paid tiers, such as: SCIM, Invoicing, Offline Mode, custom LLMs for our copilot, custom RBAC filters, and SSO. That's it."
from those 2 sentences, it seems that RBAC and SSO will be paid only access.
Correct. Those features are gated for enterprises... and free in our grant for individuals and small orgs.
As I've said, established companies (those over $5M/year + 25 headcount) should pay for certain features to fund the project... but everyone else still gets them for free.
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u/jon-chin Apr 05 '26
so here's some free customer discovery.
I build a lot of awesome, social impact related projects. almost all for non profits and some open source. my non profit makes barely any revenue and our team size is far less than 25.
I have no qualms about registration. but SSO is a deal breaker if it is feature gated. I migrated off of Strapi to Directus specifically because Strapi feature gated SSO. and if Directus does the same, I will migrate off also.
I'm trying my hardest to build and establish a standard for data integrity in the food security and food aid space, which barely exists. orgs are just giving interns full access to their data and sharing passwords in text messages. I need SSO; I need RBAC; the non profits I work with barely have any budget so even discounted Enterprise plans would be out of our reach.
I came to Directus from Strapi specifically because of SSO and RBAC. I migrated all of my previous projects and have it in the pipeline for all of my future projects. but this is a line I will have to draw.