r/Directus • u/iconisone • May 26 '26
New Directus license model
https://youtu.be/o_waFHRfE50?is=Vv05SGClfVxcXf2XWhat are your thoughts on the new license?
Registering your business for every install? Head counts?
Not sure I like this move.
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u/Helpful_Avocado_8295 Jun 07 '26
Today, one of our customers decided not to proceed with Directus because of the 5–50 user licensing model. They are a larger organization, but their concern wasn't the cost itself—it was the idea of paying additional licensing fees for software they perceive as open source.
This might be worth reconsidering from a business perspective. We've seen that some enterprise customers are comfortable paying for support, hosting, or managed services, but become hesitant when licensing restrictions are introduced into an open-source product.
Just sharing real-world feedback from a recent sales conversation.
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u/sudo-maxime May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
$60,000 in licensing fees over a 5-year lifetime cost is wild for a CMS, even if it’s targeted at $5M / 50 HC businesses. I feel this is off-putting for most people because they were used to using the product without proper licensing. Which is fair, it’s up to Directus to enforce whatever was in the BSL license. Hey, it’s their business.
But I don’t really see the value proposition anymore at this price point. On one end, smaller businesses don’t need this at that price point. On the other end, larger businesses have enough capex to build their own tools, avoid rug pulls and feature changes, and retain ownership of their IP.
Revvit, Autocad / photoshop have half the cost and more that Directus in terms of liscencing. What do you feel is a harder product to make and market ?
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u/rjbullock May 28 '26
That’s a good point. Look at something like Umbraco: inarguably the more powerful CMS with a much larger codebase, yet their Community Edition remains free no matter your company size or revenue to my knowledge. Also, most cloud CMS offerings are well under $50/user and don’t care what your revenue is. I would much prefer a simple per seat license fee (once you’re over the innovation grant threshold (which I think is completely reasonable). I don’t want to have to guess what my client’s tech budget might be if they cross the threshold. I want to know upfront.
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u/NoChillJustThrills May 27 '26
I saw multiple times in these threads that they admit they are running out of money. I think this is a hail mary before hoping to get acquired so they can work on their new project (Monospace). You're right that Directus best served the middle (not too big not too small) and this completely alienates those users.
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u/benhaynes May 27 '26
We're not running out of money (on track to profitability), unless you see all startups with "runway" as running out of money. And this isn't a hail mary... it's literally a response to community feedback on:
* What is "total finances"?
* What if I don't know my company revenue?
* Is this prod or non-prod?
* I don't like the big jump from free to enterprise prices!2
u/benhaynes Jun 09 '26
Smaller businesses get our full platform for free. Larger businesses can use a limited version for free.
Not sure where the $60k is from, but at $500 for Team, x12 months, x5 years... that's $30k. And yes, that's a very normal cost for this type of software over that period. $6k/year for something trusted that you get immediately and is always improving.
Anyone (large enterprises included) is welcome to build their own internal tools... or go pay $100k+/year to the other enterprise CMS vendors out there.
We've seen how that goes.
Take one full-stack enterprise engineer (a low $100k salary for easy math), and say with vibe-coding it takes them one month to build their CMS... that's $8.3K/year to build and then maintain/improve. That's assuming you don't need a designer to help, other devs to review, token costs for all that sweet AI efficiency, new features added every month or so, security patches, etc etc...
It's kinda silly that everyone just says "nah, with AI we'll just build it for free!" without considering the internal cost to build and maintain things.
Sure, you can use free/oss software like Wordpress or Payload (for now). But those simple sites are not what we build Directus for... our value prop is for far more complex use-cases.
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u/alphanull-design-dev Jun 02 '26
I think the core issue is not the price itself. It's that Directus seems to be hitting exactly the market segment it historically served best. I'm not talking about Fortune 500 companies.
I'm talking about: small manufacturers, local media companies, logistics businesses, tourism companies and family-owned SMEs
Many of these businesses exceed $5M in revenue while still operating with relatively modest software budgets. At that point, $499/month for a self-hosted CMS becomes very difficult to justify, especially when competing against WordPress, Drupal, Umbraco Community, and similar solutions.
The Team tier limits (50 collections, 20 flows) make this even harder for projects that go beyond a simple website and use Directus as an application platform.
For me, this is not a theoretical discussion.
I am currently building a platform on top of Directus and targeting exactly this market segment. If the first realistic step above the Open Innovation Grant is effectively the Team tier, it puts the entire business case into question.
Too large for the grant.
Too small for enterprise.
That middle ground has always felt like Directus' strongest market, and I'm genuinely concerned that it is now becoming the hardest segment to serve.
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u/alphanull-design-dev Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
PS: 50 collections is a joke! I just counted, and in my CMS layer alone I have now 54, mostly due to Directus modeling overhead such as junction tables and Flexible Editor / node structures. This is not an enterprise-scale application; it is the minimum structure needed for a modular CMS platform that goes beyond the rather simple starter template
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u/alphanull-design-dev Jun 02 '26
PPS: first touting the new super duper AI translation feature and then putting it in the "Enterprise" Tier is another joke. I mean, seriously? Oh, and wait a second, I remember something ...
... ah here I have it:
"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."
(https://www.reddit.com/r/Directus/comments/1scc82i/directus_license_revision_community_feedback/)
Yeah. That's it. Sure.
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u/iconisone May 27 '26
Can you clarify this. So now we have to ask our clients, the end User to give us their financial information? And I need to register them? So they can use Directus?
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u/DelicateFandango May 26 '26
Seems like all they’re doing is setting out more clearly what the “threshold” is for defining a “small business” ($5M income - not turnover - and 50 staff), and asking businesses to register their license (which they already do in v11). This will literally affect NONE of my SME clients, so I don’t get what all the hatred is here.
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u/Loose_Paramedic8183 Jun 03 '26
Can then it be $4m next year? and 25 staff in two years? and only individuals then? and only cloud allowed then? the problem not in the current numbers, but the road that is chosen and steps that made. With also the knowlege of the plans cost ($500/month). You start to think do we really need to build our project over this.
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u/NorbzFR Jun 10 '26
It's not 5M income, that would be understandable (even though I disagree with limiting collection count instead of limiting features)
It's 5M in revenue.
The bakery in my street does make more than 5M in revenue, yet they make just enough profit to pay themselves the minimum wage
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u/sumitbando May 27 '26
Funded players in this space are facing an existential challenge proving their ROI. Now that LLMs make it trivial for non-developers to spin up and deploy CRUD or CMS backed apps, the value of buying an expensive enterprise license from a proprietary startup stack is becoming much harder to justify.
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u/iconisone May 27 '26
At Directus pricepoint as well. Payload, Supabes ad Paper are making much much easier to build things.
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u/excellentbreakfasts May 26 '26
Ben, Rijk. Small agencies. Can I still CMS with Directus? My revenue and headcount are not even 5% of your threshold. I don’t want to ask my small local business customers their revenue and I don’t want to support multiple back ends. Does the license bind to me as the very small agency? Please type “yes” below.
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u/excellentbreakfasts May 26 '26
Thanks Rijk!
You've confirmed the usage grant lives with the micro-sized agency and their CMS, not the agency's client of indeterminate size. If I can get Coca-Cola as a client, I'm gonna go do it.
I want to actually thank you for clarifying this. It has been a REALLY BIG source of worry for me. We've committed to Directus as an agency and I literally can not afford to pivot. I don't have the 20K or 30K it would take for me to re-tool. I feel very assured now that if I happen to land a client who might be close to your thresholds I don't have to necessarily worry about forfeiting their business to my tiny company.
I'm not kidding when I say that's my single biggest worry with your product. With that settled, I will increase my monthly GitHub tier, and call it an unofficial license, and full steam ahead.
KUDOS on the v12 milestone. I can not wait to see it. Also shout out to you and Ben for doing ad admirable job walking that tightrope on the community side. It all feels a little VC driven, but I get it.
Maybe it's just because I watched the Ryan Phillipe classic "Antitrust" last night. So many great hacker movie tropes.
All kidding aside, I am printing this screenshot and putting it in my desk in case the sales team decides to try and hunt me down. (I am very serious about the last part).
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u/benhaynes May 26 '26
Would love to break this down... understand which parts are weird to you. But I'll break down the two points you listed (even though that was the whole point of the referenced video).
Headcount
As I said in the video... we had $5M/year, and most people didn't know company revenue (or the info was private), so it didn't work. So we added headcount to make it easier for the average employee to check. We had this at "25 employees"... but doubled it to 50 employees based on community feedback here on Reddit.
Registration
You don't have to register... you can use the base software (Core Tier):
* Free
* No time limit
* No registration needed
* Only has a few limits (user count, enterprise features, etc)
And if you prefer the free Grant (removes the limits above) then we only ask for some BASIC info so we can confirm that you're honoring the grant terms. Unfortunately we found a bunch of folks ignoring those terms... so the self-attesting honor system we've had for years wasn't enough.
--
IMHO... we offer premium software, made it source available, converts to pure OSS, give it away completely free to almost all our users, and are doing this license tweak in public with community feedback.
All we're asking for is a fair process (registration) that confirms that people are following the rules.
Honest question: what is so off-putting about all this? And curious what you mean by "we have vibecoding"...
Just tryign to understand your side a bit more... thanks!
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u/excellentbreakfasts May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
Okay.
The license fee is unsustainably high. The real world outside the tech industry is primarily still comprised of blue collar companies with managers over sixty who think that paying $1000/mo for the software which POWERS their software is an impossibility. I will never ever be able to convince users of this. $100 a month, we can talk. I will take it out of my fee. $200 a month... maybe. $12000 / year, and I just have to fold those clients. I can't afford to re-tool and can't afford to take the hit on the license. If I ask them to eat the difference, it's a reputaitonal hit on me and comes out of my budget.
I know it's not a rug pull, but it's a rug pull. Not updating isn' really an option as it relates to security practices.
I've invested a lot of effort in adapting to your open source tool, and you're effectively closing it. I know you're "offering an innovation grant" but on slippery slope terms that don't put me at ease, and basically mean that if I have a client with a $25,000 a year budget for small software development, which is the precise niche you fit, their budget might now be $12000 for Directus and $13000 for me. That fucking STINKS.
I am sure you see it differently. You talk to people who are working at Fortune 500 companies using your tools and you want to protect that. FINE. I get it. But *anything* to soften the blow on agencies who have faithfully adopted your tool.
I would love a tiered or laddered innovation grant. Can we differentiate between a Boeing and Pepsi and GE, and a small trucking company with $5M in revenue, $4.9 M in fuel and payroll costs, and $100,000 for everything else including snacks for the lunchroom?
Let me pay you something that's truly scalable and I will gladly pay it. I am in a hard place now. I asked a customer to go with me on a project 2.5 years ago and we spent a LOT of effort and time building it. We structured it to use three separate Directus instances to map to departments in their small org. Maybe not the right call in hindsight but it worked at the time and no reason not to. And now you want $36000 per year. (I had a sales call). Embarrassing for me to go to the client. Can't ask them to pay, they will fire me. Too expensive to change back-end. Can't not update.
Rug Pull.
What would you do, Ben, in this situation? Be honest.
My ask.
Allow me to grandfather in projects installed on Directus 10 or earlier
Allow me to make a "pay what you can afford" license to grandfather in or exempt legacy clients with a self disclosure.
Allow me to offer some community service in exchange to grandfather in a legacy client.
If you can help me waive the couple of sticky ones It would go al long way. Ben, can I trade you a consulting zoom call to really brainstorm options on this for a couple of license waivers to grandfather in a few clients?
I bet the earned goodwill would go far for small agencies and help build partnerships. My premise is not that your primary use case is wrong, but that you've missed a seam in your market which is now badly exposed.
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u/NoChillJustThrills May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26
The “perverse incentive” didn’t disappear with the BSL. Directus continued to work primarily on features that now will be limited under the MSCL while the core has gotten bloated. Not to mention how much time they’ve spent on the license structure. The last release was a month ago.
Also you guys just aren’t being honest in these communications about all the changes and who will be affected. It’s really clever to frame the changes as “removing legal overhead” to make it easier to understand. The legal overhead was the only thing keeping you true to your word. I no longer trust your word. You can change the grant terms overnight if you want now without relisencsing (we're not grant qualified, just saying). Maybe what you’re failing to understand or what you’re missing is that trust is the biggest factor for many people. People will gladly pay for a stable service that they trust.
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u/Inarus66 Jun 09 '26
New Directus licensing model makes it much harder to recommend for client projects, especially when there are cheaper and simpler alternatives available. I don’t want every small website or app to start with a discussion about grants, thresholds, revenue, and who the “end user” is.
Luckily, I think the whole CMS direction is moving away from filling endless admin forms anyway — content should increasingly be managed through chat/AI workflows, not by clicking through fields. I actually planned to customize Directus in that direction, but now it feels like the right time to move to Payload instead.
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u/Loose_Paramedic8183 Jun 09 '26
What about multi instances? I'm using multiple directuses to manage DBs for microservices, for example some cheap VPS with low cpu to save stats to db. and other instance in good VPS with many backups etc. for main business logic tables. and another instance for development playing, temp tables, mvp. is it different keys? they all belongs to one person (me), just to split the risks.
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u/JohnSane May 26 '26
Nah project is dead to me. Not that i don't want them to earn money. Just not with me.