Comment by Alupis
2 days ago
You don't just have to self-host, they offer a hosted version that's far more reasonably priced than Figma[1].
Their free tier supports up to 8 members, limited to 10GB of storage.
The next tier supports unlimited members, and is price-capped at $175 a month, but is limited to 25GB of storage.
The final tier is price-capped at $950 a month, with unlimited storage.
For now. Mattermost too used to be cheaper than Slack, and Gitlab too used to be cheaper than GitHub. I know the story, "look we did X, the open-source Y" and two years in you now have two versions, the free and the "enterprise" one with exclusive features.
Mattermost is nice but I lost some respect for them for a couple reasons:
1. Slightly worse product than Slack (if just for lack of connect) yet they're charging more for the cheapest license.
2. Gating reasonable OAuth support behind the paid version is crippleware
IMO they're gonna get forked, and they'll deserve it.
What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?
Please don’t say donations because that doesn’t work for something as complex as the projects you mentioned
Edit: ok there are some where it works like Blender - no idea how they do it though…
Blender did it by facing the industry going cutting edge for a decade or more. They somehow found enough donation to keep the thing as indie would support it just enough. Today blender is arguably better than industry standards, they just have to face the marketing wave but like Wikipedia probably got plenty of support.
These are the rare examples of Linux going through the torrent, typically emerges as proud victorious, with reasonably low profile
The open core model is fine, but your community edition should be a reasonably complete product. Gitlab is a good example of this. They're not selling access, they're selling convenience.
The features that differentiate to enterprise customers don't matter to small shops anyhow: policy compliance, monitoring, fancy reporting, fine grained access control,etc. Give away tools that are useful for individuals and small teams, and charge for the features that are large team/enterprise related.
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> What would be a better way to fund large-scale open source projects in your opinion?
Same price for same core feature set would be a good start. Or lower price for smaller feature set.
Having a premium price for a reduced product means your target audience is limited to people willing to pay a premium for a lesser product to support open source. There are some groups willing to do this, but most simply want a tool that does the job without adding too much to their already huge SaaS budget.
I’m extremely sensitive to core workflow tools for a company these days. It only takes a few days of lost work because some tool corrupted your design or the engineers have to spend a few days working around an issue in a tool to make the effective cost of using that tool extremely high.
Engineering time is expensive. If a tool that costs $20 per person per month causes even one issue per month that potentially produces hours of work and rework (like the spontaneously resizing element a commenter above noted) then the true cost is going to be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in lost productivity.
There are multiple models:
1. Like Sentry - open source all the features, provide the cloud (hosted) version. Most businesses don't want to self-host, but want a bit cheaper alternative
2. Paid tier, buy once - own forever with 1 year update support. Later you can charge lower price to extend the update cycle.
3. Blender model - donations. Very hard to get it right.
4. Laravel/Next.js model - Open source the tooling, monetize the platform
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That's the beauty of the open source, self-hosted option then, no? If they radically change pricing one day, pick up your ball and self-host without any limits.
And that's exactly why they don't do radical changes, because people hate those. They do slow, small and insidious changes over a long time period. And then it isn't as easy to simply "pick up your ball" and be on your way.
> unlimited storage
Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.
It's a little like "unlimited holidays". If you turn up on day 1 and then say "Right, I'm off on my unlimited holidays! See you never!" and disappeared, they would stop paying you. There is an implicit fair use clause in all unlimited offers - I know a guy who pushed back on "unlimited holidays" because he didn't want to get penalised in performance reviews and it turns out that in his UK-based org it was 29 days a year, or one day more than the legal statutory minimum.
Firms like penpot are basically saying "look, if you pay us this much, we're not going to put hard quotas on you, just get on with it", but if you then try storing backups of annas archive on it, they are probably going to suggest that you are not operating within the spirit of the agreement, even if you're within the letter of it: fair use will apply.
Some people like to know where they stand. They want hard quotas. So fine, ask them for hard quotas. Ask for the fair use clause and understand it.
Most of us know what it means (it's a soft quota with fair use limitations), and are happy with not abusing the tier and having a bit more freedom, though.
Hah. I'm a self employed freelancer, but a friend works for (MegaCorp Intl) and every time we go for beers he mentions that he has "Unlimited Paid Time Off". But whenever I ask if that means he could take a few months to hike the Andes with me, he says.... well, no, actually they'd fire him if he took too much time. How much is too much? I ask. Well basically anything that would make them notice his absence, apparently.
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The issue is that if storage is too cheap, people will inevitably mine filecoin on it. Additionally, promising "unlimited storage" and not holding that promise might be a legal liability.
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It likely is as it is not general purpose storage.
Even though your Linux iso's are called "images", they can not be added to a penpot design file - sorry to say.
Can penpot import images? Given enough time, anything that can store PNG will become an automated backup backend
Does it really matter if in real-world-use 99% of the users never hit any limit? And I cannot blame anyone to use "unlimited" instead of "fair use, with reasonably large limits so that you will (probably) never see any restrictions in your use of the product"
HN users want to know if you're allowed to host the whole Internet on it.
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Perhaps "uncapped" rather than "unlimited" would be a better term for us to start using
I would say it's the opposite. If there is moral compass and we don't get high-up if someone tries to store their Linux isos on pen pot and gets a ban.