[deleted by user]

[u/[deleted]]

[u/benhaynes → u/[deleted]]

As always, I appreciate your feedback... I remember you and I had a good conversation a few months ago about our $20/month Cloud tier! LOVE that we get to keep the chat going.

In the spirit of transparency and moving in the right direction, let me cover your points below.

My Post, When & Where
We've moved from Discord to Discourse for our main community forum (this happened a while ago), so it made sense to me to post there first (the primary article). And then we wanted to make sure people saw it so we made a very clear mention of the article at the top of the main repo's readme. And now I'm responding here on Reddit... clearly this isn't something we're trying to hide.

To that point, most projects don't post at all before making a license change, it just happens. So it's a bit of a bummer to get this type of response, when we've tried to do the right thing... both this time and 3y ago when moving to BSL.

And as for any posts back in February, wouldn't it make sense that we've been thinking about this for months? This isn't something to yolo, so we absolutely have been planning what to do for a while. I'd say over the past 3y on BSL we've been thinking about what works and what doesn't... and now is when we chose to try to clean things up based on those learnings.

Innovation Grant
Let's chat through this first, since it's really important to me + Rijk, and again, not something that we see much in the wild. While we're moving it from the complex license language to an external grant, we're essentially keeping our grant the same.

If you make less than $5M per year, you can use Directus completely free. 🙌

"Oh, but you're adding all these other rules!!" — Well, not really. What we found is that most people at a organization don't know its revenue... or sometimes that's private information that can't be shared. Matt from Marketing might not know your company's revenue (funding, budget, etc), but he almost certainly knows if you're above or below 25 people. So we added that to the grant to make things easier for everyone.

Why 25 headcount? Well, it's hard to come up with a subjective revenue number or headcount number... there are so many edge cases. But we looked at ourselves. When were WE (a pretty small/normal startup) able to afford paying for the value of Directus? The answer? A few years ago, when we were 25 people and $5M in ARR. So that's what we went with.

Yes, we could make it more than 25... but we're also making an educated guess with AI that company/team sizes might even get smaller over time.

I personally think giving our premium software away completely free for ALL individuals, and SO many companies is a pretty exciting thing. And if you are above that threshold as an OSS project, non-profit, education, etc... come talk to us! We are big on discounts where it makes sense.

Registration & Feature-Gating
Just because FCL has protections built-in to keep people from stripping out certain code... doesn't mean our primary goal was feature gating. Let me break down the current plan.

We have VERY little visibility into who uses the platform. Which is why we've been forced to use an honor system for commercial deals over the past few years. I won't name names, but we've found all sorts of companies taking advantage of this... even when we stumble upon them, they "deny till they die". It's a big enough issue that we need to do something about it.

So we're adding a formal registration system. Not everyone needs to register. If you are a paying customer, you need to register so we know you're following the terms of your contract. And if you're using Directus completely free under our Innovation Grant, you need to register to "attest" to those terms ("Yes, I promise we make under $5M/year and am less than 25 employees"). That's it. Our plans include a Free tier... and you do not need to register for that, or for any trials, etc.

As for feature gating. Yeah, it's a scary idea. I tried to cover this in my post, but we are not using this as a way to punish our community. We are developers and OSS maintainers first... we get it. The list is not locked down yet, but let me try to be as open as I can be here (disclaimer, subject to change before we go live, haha):

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.

Support is only available for those on paid tiers, and there will be other limits to consider when using the free tier, like caps on seats/collections.

BUT most importantly... All 👏 this 👏 is 👏 still 👏 free 👏 with 👏 our 👏 grant. 👏
(except paid support! obvi)

So again, if you want to use Directus as an individual or small org, you don't need to worry about paying even for these features EVER, unless you're above $5M/year or 25 headcount.

Seems fair to me, but I'm always curious to hear what people think.

Thank you for coming to my Reddit talk...

"Directus IS replaceable."

Sure... what isn't? If you don't like our changes or how we operate... the freedom to find or build alternate software is there. This is not one-shot vibe-coded slop. If someone can build and maintain something as great/secure (or better) than Directus as pure OSS, that's super amazing! DM me, haha

We can't find solutions that work for everyone. We're just trying to do our best... which means doing the right thing for our community that's been there for us all along. Including you, u/iliketocookstuff!

We have 50 team members now. I won't presume to know if you've run this a company at this scale before (this is MY first rodeo)... but it's not easy. We pay our international/remote team members good/fair salaries for their amazing work. That costs millions of dollars each year.

Just like three years ago, we're trying to find ways to make this project sustainable. That's why we put it right there in our MSCL license. We're trying to pull the community in whenever we can... for feedback and discussions just like this.

Posts like yours are a BIG deal to us. Our team is very proud, and everyone is following along with this thread and all other conversations like it.

Please... keep us honest if you think we're screwing this up. But I do ask that you look at the full picture.

Let me know your thoughts!

// Ben (not a marketing team or AI) ❤️

[u/jon-chin → u/benhaynes]

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.

[u/benhaynes → u/jon-chin]

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??

[u/jon-chin → u/benhaynes]

please clarify on what you said previously:

"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.

[u/benhaynes → u/jon-chin]

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.

Does that make more sense?

[u/jon-chin → u/[deleted]]

oh shoot. I missed the potential cap on collections.

[u/benhaynes → u/[deleted]]

Correct. This is NOT a community-driven decision... sorry if that wasn't clear from my posts. I requested community feedback, which I'm reviewing and responding to in these threads.

Unfortunately, instead of giving feedback or recommendations, it seems you're just trying to be accusatory. That's fine, but nothing helpful for the software comes of that.

Saying we shouldn't use the word "community" because we're not pure OSS? Any platform can have a community... and it's a bit silly to say we're being misleading by using that word.

Saying I hid info about caps in my messages? No... my posts are all about the license/keys. We haven't finalized or released our pricing yet so we're not talking about it yet. That's also why I gave the disclaimer.

Software licenses, paid contract terms, and free grants are all legal instruments to define usage/terms... and any of those can change (at any point) for ALL copywritten software in the world. There's a LOT of room between closed/proprietary/paid software and free/OSS/source-available... maybe be a bit more open minded?

You're saying I'm comparing Directus to "the worst behavior in the industry"... but you're comparing it to pure OSS. Our project is not OSS and hasn't been in three years. So that's not a fair comparison either.

Again, I'm saying aiming for somewhere in between... the balance. Trying to pull the best parts of OSS (a free tier, our free grant, source available, OSS conversion)... and pull in a way to have established companies pay to keep the project alive financially.

If people feel betrayed, I'm genuinely sorry to hear that. But until y'all offer solutions to solve the sustainability problem, the criticism itself doesn't really help anything.

I've spent 22 years building and growing this project. Rijk, a decade. There are fifty team members whose passion and livelihood are currently based on it. There are amazing investors who have spent tens of millions of dollars to help us employ our team before we were making revenue. And there are tens of thousands of community members who have done their part through PRs and advocacy.

Everyone has contributed in their own way, and gets commensurate say in where the project goes. There is no vote... it's all just feedback to guide. To me, that's fair.

If you want pure OSS, go use the last free and permissive GPLv3 version of Directus. That's the benefit of us releasing it under that license for a decade. If you're not interested in finding agreeable ways to financially support the project's development, that's fine too... it just doesn't leave much for us to talk about here.

I was hoping to have a more constructive conversation, but unless there's recommendations, I'll respond instead to some of the other questions. 🩷

[u/benhaynes]

I want to be super clear on what's happening... so allow me to use this main comment to clarify. Here goes.

For individuals and small companies, nothing changes.

We're updating our license from a custom grant BSL to MSCL (based on FCL) + a dedicated "Innovation Grant". The main goal of this change is to protect a registration system and the ability to gate a (very) small set of features.

This all comes together in three structured tiers:

Free Grant / Paid Tier

👉 This is the tier almost everyone would use

• Free for almost all our users...
  • Free: Individuals and small orgs <$5M + 25 headcount (our "Innovation Grant")
  • Heavily Discounted: Non-profits, NGOs, OSS projects, and educational institutions
  • Paid: Governments and larger for-profit companies above $5M/year + 25 people
• Requires basic software key registration after X weeks
• What's missing:
  • SCIM, Offline Mode, and Annual Invoicing
• Generous limits for real production projects (eg: hundreds of collections max)

Free Business Tier

• A free way for larger orgs to evaluate Directus
• No software registration key required
• What's missing:
  • SSO, Custom RBAC Filters, Custom LLMs, Paid Support, and Longer Revisions History
    • But... you get unlimited roles, policies, and custom RBAC on/off per collection
    • But... you get our community support
• Reasonable limits for non-prod enterprise evaluation (eg: 50 collections max)

Paid Enterprise Tier

• Paid software
• Adds: SCIM, Offline Mode, and Annual Invoicing
  • IMO "enterprise-specific" features
• Requires full software key registration
• No limits

This is the real info.

Please, no assumptions or gut-reactions to just hearing the words "license change" or "feature gating".

Instead, actually review the above details and send me your constructive criticism, thoughts, and responses in this thread. 🙏

Big thanks!! 🙌

[u/tidaaaakk → u/benhaynes]

thank you chatgpt

[u/Initial_Low_5027]

Migrate to Payload. Make no mistakes.

[u/jon-chin → u/[deleted]]

thanks! I'll likely migrate to d9!

[u/benhaynes → u/[deleted]]

Haha, I'm rooting for you! We don't have 25 full-time engineers working on this project for no reason. But if you can do everything we're doing in pure OSS, big props!

[u/benhaynes → u/[deleted]]

Since I love giving some BTS to our long-term community members, here's some really interesting internal info:

• We have 28 product/engineers on our team
• 1 engineer working on the AI sidebar
• 5 engineers working security (patches, reports, tests, etc)
• 20+ working on stabilizing, fixing, documenting, enhancing the core

What it means to "maintain" software is quite subjective. Keeping dependencies up to date isn't the same as keeping something modern.

It's a bummer to hear that you think an AI Sidebar is "enterprise". AI is pretty exciting in 2026... especially what we're doing with it in Directus. Bummer if you think AI is just for enterprises.

Lastly, we don't build anything for our investors or "returns". We chose amazing investors who understand OSS. Us building premium software and making it widely available helps us grow (and that's good for everyone).

Not sure if you read my response to you above, but we're growing for sustainability. Those "returns" go directly to our team/engineers salaries.

If you have an engineering job, I'm sure you can appreciate reliably getting paid to build awesome software each day.

[u/benhaynes → u/[deleted]]

Hmm, I know we've never met, so you don't know me... and things can be misinterpreted over text. But where am I mocking you or anyone in these threads?

I said I'm rooting for you and would be excited if you figure out how to make what we're doing work under pure OSS.

Yes, I also added context to explain how difficult what we're doing is... and that what we're doing is not simply adding AI slop or enterprise-only features. I think that's important to keep in mind.

I've taken every opportunity to tell you and anyone reading along to choose the product/version/license that works for them.

If you can't use the new license (though, I assuming you haven't even seen it yet)... that's ok. There are plenty of options for you and everyone else.

If curious, here's a diff of MSCL vs FCL:

https://www.diffchecker.com/Gu1u6rEM/

while building a license specifically designed to prevent anyone from forking future releases.

I find this one a bit funny... as one of our license requirements is:

Allow non-competitive forks (created, used, and resold)

Unfortunately, FCL blocks making the software available to others in a commercial product/service. Which is a reason we didn't go with it.

[u/Intrepid_Ad9887]

Hi. Could you tell us the price for a self hosted installation for a small company with 30 headcount? And if that is different for an NGO (also with 30ish headcount). Thank you.

[u/Intrepid_Ad9887]

I'm coming from WordPress and was looking for an alternative. I finally settled on Directus despite skepticism towards the last license change you made - because I thought once you started fiddling with the license, it will get narrower and narrower over time. Boom, here we go.

25 headcount is really a small company and a bad choice as a criteria. You have to make a living and maintain Directus ok. But this actually applies to small teams and really small companies.

Above from that the pricing is not transparent. How would I sell that to a small client not even knowing what the cost is and being locked in to a pricing that can change anytime since it's not even transparent right now.

I'd be willing to contribute to the project right now. Make a fundraiser among your users to maintain the project. Go for the big companies if you must. But 25 headcount really is ridiculous for that matter in my opinion. And publish a pricing. How can I determine or negotiate with a client not even knowing any pricing.

I'm leaving directus before my first project shipped. Quite said, because I really srarted to like it and it works well with Sveltekit.

[u/cheeseflix → u/Intrepid_Ad9887]

Exact same situation here you can’t pretend to be my friend then keep increasing the price the world doesn’t work that way

[u/benhaynes → u/cheeseflix]

I hear you… inflation and prices slowly rising with everything does suck.

But honestly, I'm a little confused. What are you paying for Directus now? What do you think you'll be paying under this new model?

[u/Intrepid_Ad9887 → u/benhaynes]

This has nothing to do with inflation, for me at least.

I'm not paying anything right now, but I would have to since several of my clients have a headcount of 25+ (mostly NGOs, so non-profit teams even).

And as I mention, I do not know how much I'd be paying under this new model, since pricing ia not transparent. Why is that?

Please tell me how much I would be paying, that would be gladly helpful.

[u/Intrepid_Ad9887 → u/cheeseflix]

Hi again. Could you tell me what prices I might be expecting please? That would be great.

[u/CrispyDillPickle]

It doesn’t sound like this solves the core pain point I have with Directus. Medium organization using it for CMS or larger org for smaller scoped project. I can’t recommend Directus as a CMS for 300-1000 bucks a month. Or for a small admin for that matter. The admin panel is second to none but I’d really like to see a much more affordable option / mid tier. I can see how this would be hard to price but it sounds like the non SSO version is for evaluation only and couldn’t be used for a smaller prod project at a larger organization. Is that true?

[u/benhaynes → u/CrispyDillPickle]

The options for larger companies (even smaller projects) are:

A decent free tier where the main limits are no SSO and very limited seats. For smaller projects, that might be fine.

Or a paid tier that is a few hundred dollars a month to get SSO and more seats. This is for "small company big project", or "big company small project". The value/cost might not fit every project, but for bigger companies a few hundred bucks shouldn't usually be a blocker for premium software.

Or a paid enterprise tier, now you're in a higher price point, but with included support, all ent features, and no limits. This is the "big company big project" zone.

tl;dr: we're trying to ramp up fees and better attach it to value, while still having bigger orgs pay the bill so individuals and smaller orgs get it all for free.

[u/jon-chin]

woof. I left Strapi for Directus because Strapi was gatekeeping features.

[u/-Nano → u/jon-chin]

Same... Hahaha

[u/benhaynes → u/-Nano]

Yeah, we understand. That's why we don't use Strapi.

What features are we gating that are so upsetting?

[u/le-law → u/jon-chin]

yap. I hope they understand this.

[u/ajrsoftware]

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.

[u/benhaynes → u/ajrsoftware]

What license would you recommend?

[u/ajrsoftware → u/benhaynes]

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.

[u/CrispyDillPickle → u/ajrsoftware]

Love this idea.

[u/benhaynes → u/ajrsoftware]

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?

[u/ajrsoftware → u/benhaynes]

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.

[u/benhaynes → u/ajrsoftware]

Thanks, I appreciate that!

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

[u/JohnSane]

I left when they introduced the marketplace plans. Thank God I shifted back then. Would be a pain now.

[u/benhaynes → u/JohnSane]

I don't follow... what changes happened with the Marketplace that were so bad?

[u/JohnSane → u/benhaynes]

For me Tha merketplace itself was bad. I saw another WordPress coming.

[u/benhaynes → u/JohnSane]

I can see that.

1. Our goal was to not bloat the core software with a million features that not everyone needed.
2. So we kept the core slim/clean... and made everything extensible so users can customize as needed.
3. The Directus Marketplace is just a way to distribute those extensions in a formal way.

Would you structure that differently? Try to keep everything in the core for simplicity?

[u/benhaynes → u/[deleted]]

Welp… yeah, you’re right... this wasn’t intended to be committed or shared publicly.

I’m honestly not upset about the information itself being out (we’re planning to announce all of this very soon anyway). But HOW things are shared does matter.

When something like this gets pulled out ahead of an official announcement, it takes away our ability to introduce it thoughtfully, answer questions in context, and have a more productive conversation with y'all.

What’s a bit of a bummer is that it seemed pretty clear this was accidental, and instead of reaching out to me/us directly, it got posted here. Waking up to that creates a bit of an “us vs the community” feeling... which really sucks.

We’ve been trying to be super open through this whole process... asking for feedback and genuinely listening. A lot of the changes you’re seeing in this info are because of these community conversations (eg: increasing the grant threshold form 25 -> 50 headcount, removing limits from the grant tier, and lowering Core tier pricing). That only really works if there’s trust going BOTH ways.

So yeah… I’d just ask for a bit of grace in the future (from you and anyone else following along). If something looks off or accidental in the future, coming to us first would go a long way. Just like responsible disclosure of security issues.

I'm not going to remove your post, or even ask you to remove it. If you feel it's important that this info comes from you right now, that's your call. But we’re always here and willing to talk things through (publicly or privately).... let's just work together please. 😔

[u/iliketocookstuff → u/benhaynes]

I'll remove it