Very exciting! Question: your homepage says it’ll always be Apache 2 but what will you do if someone like AWS rebrands your work (looking over at Elastic here)?
Mat here (Seb's Cofounder). Great question. We are not only building a piece of infrastructure but a complete product with its own UI and features, rather than a standalone API. Our customer is the end-user more than the person wanting to build on top of it. GitLab and others have shown that when you do that the probability of being forked or just resold goes down drastically.
Yes! We will be having features that you have to pay a subscription for. It starts with the usual suspects: custom SSO, custom domains, and authorization - things that we would be hosting as an ongoing service for customers. Most features will be open when we create them -- this is near and dear to our hearts -- it’s important our users can be successful with the OSS version. Over time, the commercial features will also flow into the open as we release new proprietary ones. Our commercial features will be public in our repo, under a commercial license.
We will also have a managed version where we deploy and maintain it for the customer in a cloud account they provide us.
We are still experimenting with pricing and what can be open and closed. To be completely transparent we chose custom domains because we know companies care a lot. When we have more features on the commercial side we can start to chat about supporting it in the open version. Still early in our journey, happy to discuss anything, like a small plan with just custom domains. Would you pay for that?
Yeah. That’s kind of what I mean. I have no problem paying some money to support you guys and not have to host it on my own. I generally prefer my monitoring etc to not be done by myself anyway cause I take myself offline way too often
Only point was of there was going to be a smaller plan for homelabs or the like that doesn’t have the raw amount of Traffic or features as the enterprise plans do.