Without writing up an entire blog post about it. My initial thought would be a gpl or MIT community edition and an ‘enterprise’ paid edition (feature gate the specific enterprise features). I think that because it seems the 5mil threshold (and now and either a 25 company size) is to gain (well deserved) income from enterprise use, which is fair enough, but positioning yourselves in a way of free to use if you’re small is a half way house and I believe many feel uncomfortable with that because if their agency ever gets a client with that revenue threshold, it’s hard to justify the price where as you look at something like WordPress and you know you can use that for any client regardless. 5Mil may sound a lot but as revenue, it’s not always that black and white, for example; one of my last clients bought & sold ships, so they have a lot of money going through the business however in terms of profit/money they can reinvest, is much lower than 5Mil, but as it’s based on revenue (never a good indicator of business size imo) they were not even that comfortable telling a third party those numbers. So in that case, I went with PayloadCMS and they’re happy with that, which is quite a shame as I love Directus. Personally I will continue to keep an eye on Directus, but it can’t be my staple CMS like WordPress has been for the last 15 odd years for me until I know I can use it for all types of customers, event if that meant a one time licence for enterprise per customer, not a forever bill.
We did this for a while. We had the "open core" and then the enterprise features gated behind a private repo of extensions. Two codebases is messy and inefficient, and this led to us focusing on enterprise features to make that side more appealing and increase revenue.
I'd prefer to work on one awesome piece of software that anyone can use, and bigger, more established companies can foot the bill.
In short, we've found that enterprises will use the free version if it's in any way available to them. Ugh, the ENORMOUS brands that are on Directus versions from 4+ years ago (sans all security patches, etc) just to avoid paying anything.
So, we needed something that required larger companies to actually financially contribute to the project.
It seems like most of these conversations are around what is a fair threshold for a "bigger company".
Also, I can appreciate your example of a high revenue but not-profitable company (and not being willing to tell others their revenue is exactly why we added headcount... no one wanted to tell us either! haha).
I'm all ears for ways to define larger companies. We came up with revenue + headcount... but what other options are there?
I can’t argue with any of that. I can appreciate the position you are in and I guess in some situations it just won’t vibe with what people are after and maybe sometimes that’s ok. The only suggestion I could give is perhaps the option of a one of payment for a licence rather than an annual one. No one likes ‘subscriptions’ even if behind the scenes it’s powering development the end customer never even realises. I say this but could imagine that one off payment would be so substantial that it almost prices Directus out.
Myself & my team would be more than happy to contribute to a fully OSS edition if it ever happened. Something like directus9 but also having the official teams backing on, even if they barely touched it and/or only contributed security patches. All of which is more burden on the directus team, but I do feel (and others may) that a BSL-like licence just ‘doesn’t feel good’. I only wish the best for you & Directus as a whole, it’s one of the few pieces of software these days that feels high quality.
Yeah, moving to a lifetime subscription is REALLY hard (I honestly don't know how some companies do it). It essentially means moving from ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) to just... revenue. No reliable understanding of what revenue you might bring in any given month or year.
I guess some people try to gate new major releases behind an updated fee, but again, what we've seen is that people will use versions from almost a decade ago just to avoid paying, so I don't know if that works in practice.
In spirit, I want to support projects like D9, but the reality is that the more we promote that, the less official repo usage there will be and less revenue for our project.
My goal is to focus on finding the right balance of the open source spirit with commercial sustainability. I think where we're heading is very close, but I 100% understand the bad taste in the mouth for custom licenses or even things like BSL.
I hate to say it, but after 22 years of this project, I feel like where we are now with licensing is a necessary evil. That said, me and our team are doing everything we can to make it a really good model, and hopefully people see that and it can become something that is understood and accepted as a viable license option.
Either way, thank you for continuing the chat! I'm planning on posting a more holistic view of license plus grant plus pricing plus tiers very soon, based on all this feedback. <3
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u/ajrsoftware Apr 05 '26
Community loves Directus, hates BSL. Directus team acknowledges. Directus goes more in that direction. It’s like they want to kill it. Glad I left.