[Alupis]

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.

[1] https://penpot.app/pricing

[hk__2]

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.

[CuriouslyC]

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.

[sallveburrpi]

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…

[CuriouslyC]

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.

[Tostino]

You're naive if you think those don't affect small shops.

If you want to do enterprise software, even as a small shop, things like requiring pull request approvals is an absolute must.

Our customers demand it.

Doesn't matter how many employees we have, or how profitable we are. If we want to sell software to most large CPG companies, this stuff is non-negotiable.

So I just use GitHub.

[CuriouslyC]

The workflow I like in Gitlab is protected branches. This lets you go fast on a dev trunk then pull changes over intentionally.

[hirako2000]

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

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[mirzap]

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

[satvikpendem]

Sentry isn't open source, it's source available.

[Alupis]

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.

[hk__2]

No because they add limits to the self-hosted versions too. self-hosted Mattermost or Gitlab instances don’t have access to all the features. Prefect even removed basic features from the self-hosted version (webhooks) to force people to use their Cloud offering.

[hju22_-3]

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.

[poly2it]

> unlimited storage

Surely it's not actually unlimited. I wish such claims wouldn't be as common in the industry.

[PaulRobinson]

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.

[noduerme]

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.

[Aurornis]

Every company is different. I’ve had the “unlimited time off” company where the CEO would go after anyone who took a week or more.

I’ve also had the unlimited time off company where I took an actual month off and it was fine because I got my work done.

[falcor84]

And there's a problem in the other direction too - I don't expect people who really can leave for a few months without their absence being noticable to have much job security.

[noduerme]

This is a corporate culture thing. I can be in the middle of nowhere for months, and it makes no difference to my clients. No one even notices. I have a phone that always rings, and laptop. I don't have a corporate health plan or a 401k but I don't have to ask permission..

[sallveburrpi]

But if you are still reachable you aren’t on time off… I also work remotely from anywhere; doesn’t mean I’m constantly on vacation

[poly2it]

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.

[written-beyond]

I laughed but also hate the fact that the world needs to worry about "file coin" ruining it for us.

[sallveburrpi]

Tbh if it wasn’t crypto it would be something else - people always find a way. Tragedy of the commons or something like that

[tossandthrow]

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.

[kuschku]

Can penpot import images? Given enough time, anything that can store PNG will become an automated backup backend

[walski]

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"

[okhobb]

HN users want to know if you're allowed to host the whole Internet on it.

[tonyhart7]

This is why we can't have nice things.

People see 'unlimited' and will do everything in their power to 'fact-check' it, forcing the producer to place a 'hard cap' and making everyone's life worse.

[Aurornis]

Can confirm. Worked at a startup with some very generous (though not “unlimited”) limits designed to allow for bursts and spikes of usage.

Some people took it upon themselves to try to abuse and saturate the limits to “prove” that we couldn’t handle it.

We could actually handle it, but it wasn’t worth offering it to this small number of users who were trying to prove a point by abusing it to the max without an actual use case. They just wanted to show off on Reddit that the were making our servers suffer.

[tonyhart7]

I still remember people abusing Claude Code, they even had a leaderboard for who spent the most tokens.

Billions of tokens wasted for nothing

[wltr]

Don’t use the unlimited lie then, I assume.

[tonyhart7]

It's not a lie if no one is abusing it.

Travel to high trust societies if you don't get what I mean.

Things would be so much easier if we could expect human decency and ethics, even if there is no law against it, because it goes against our values as humans.

[mnx]

"starbucks says there is no limit on how many napkins I can use but they got mad when I took the whole container, liars"

[reddalo]

Creative people could start encoding terabytes of movies inside of Penpot documents.

[chrisbuc]

Perhaps "uncapped" rather than "unlimited" would be a better term for us to start using

[BoredPositron]

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.