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Hey @boyney123. We chatted a while back about my company's requirements and I know for a fact from our conversation that you are 100% committed to giving people the best value they can - you could have tried to convince me to go for a paid tier (as we discussed federation etc.) but you were very transparent and said it wouldn't be necessary. I mention this because I know from that conversation that you are not trying to do everything in your power to make money over giving people the tools they need to document their architecture. We have used EventCatalog internally for a while - we haven't been great at keeping it up to date but that's an us problem. I love the product, it's clean, user friendly, extensible and you've done an amazing job updating it even when it potentially doesn't make you any money. I like your current split of pricing - I think if anything your 250 user threshold is extremely generous. As a company of ~25 it works for us as is, although with the increase of our usage in AI tooling we'd pay for those features before we reach the user threshold, and I think it's a fair cost. As someone who does a lot of homelab/self hosting but also has responsibilities for making decisions on what we host at work, I maybe have a good perspective to share. Personally I like the route that a lot of open source projects take where they provide the community with the majority of features for their self hosted service, but provide a cloud offering. Obviously there are costs and difficulties involved with a cloud offering so it has to work for you as the maintainer of that infrastructure as well. I also think as an open source maintainer a huge threat is AI - someone can take your core, then see what features they want on top and "just" get their AI tools to build it. Will it ever be as good as your own implementations, and do they get support from you? No - but for a lot of people that will be enough. In conclusion: Event Catalog needs to live on no matter what. It's an awesome product that provides huge value, and it isn't fair that you can't benefit from your hard work. I think for us the barrier of entry/cost has led to slight hesitation, but it's not so high that we wouldn't jump on it when our priorities are lined up. I think your plan to convert released versions to MIT licensed code on a delay is incredibly generous. |
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Hi @boyney123,
Random ideas...
TLDR; I like where you want to go with the licensing. It's simple and fair, and also generous. |
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I have also been collecting feedback offline from folks, and mostly people seem to be supportive which is great. One thing people have said is the journey that EventCatalog gets adopted. Many teams and orgs start with one team to evaluate which takes time and we would need to make sure we have a solution for this for folks. I'm thinking a 60-90 day trial for EventCatalog (All features) and then commercial license would kick in. But for teams that need more time, and extension path for them (prove the value model), where they can get a discounted license to prove the value internally before going into a full commercial license. I'm not 100% sure yet, but I will take into consideration the journey that the catalog is adopted. |
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I Dave It sounds like a good direction for the project. Obviously open-core didnt quite match what you needed from EC as a business and it showed everywhere in the copy about licensing and the different subscription models. I had proposed EC in bank and nobody really understood if it was opensource, if we were going to be able to modify some of its features. Confusing.. Regarding subscription based extensions, you are right. We were considering a few like the asyncapi/openapi generators bc we are an API-First shop, and they didnt feel like they were a well rounded product, nor something to pay as a subscription, maybe as a one time payment, maybe.. So this is a good, and it feels honest and sincere movement.. The business needs to be healthy, because there is a bus factor of one. Not good for enterprise adoption/perception. As a long time opensource contributor and maintainer. EC looked like you didnt feel comfortable with the license you chose when it was a hobby/ side project. It didnt feel somewhere to happily contribute (also bc you were too fast explpring in every direction, hard to follow) I'm also an explorer of this particular domain (EDA) as developer and opensourcerer. I hope you get to grow the business and the project. Because it was really inspiring how you went from hobby to self-sustained bootstrapped oss project. (We can see also your hair whitening, but nevertheless very inspiring) Just two personal opinions if mine:
Another opinion, now a bit adversarial... but still honest. I dont see EC as a goberning tool, nor a designing tool... Just a website, derived from existing APIs and documents.. (But the designer and goberning tool are still required and an empty space) Looking forward the continuity of your project.. Have fun!!!!!!!!!!!!!! |
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Hey David, The direction you're targeting is plausible. I totally understand the reasoning. (Disclaimer: I don't use EventCatalog (yet), but I am interested in projects and solo-businesses like yours.) Not that long ago, I explored your pricing page and saw a section about fair pricing. It reminds me of what you described here (bigger organizations were asked to pay/contribute more) and I wonder how it was different from what you have in mind right now? In the meantime, the pricing page changed and doesn't look like that anymore. Cheers, |
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Hi @boyney123, Thanks for taking the time to write this up and discuss in public. One thing that comes to mind: I'm not sure how you'd measure planned or actual adoption reliably without metering, which you've rightly ruled out. One option might be to let organisations license at the subsidiary or business-unit level and self-certify that unit's revenue or budget, in keeping with the self-certification approach. Feels a bit complex though. Consolidated revenue may still be the best compromise, and you'll have far better data than me on how rollouts actually look across paying customers. So TL;DR - I think it sounds a sensible and fair pricing model, and opens the door to community development across the entire product, which can only be a good thing. Also, as someone whose company pays for EventCatalog today, thanks for honouring existing agreements. Surprise licence changes are all too common and very disruptive, so the commitment is appreciated 🙏🏽 |
Update: where I've landed on pricingThanks everyone for the feedback here and in private. It's shaped a lot of this. Here's where things stand. Nothing is final yet, and I'd love your thoughts. The licence (mostly unchanged)
How the commercial licence is pricedThe biggest change: pricing is based on how many teams use EventCatalog, not your company's size. Almost every organisation starts with one team and grows from there, and the price should follow that.
On feature gates: in my first post I said there would be none. The documentation product is the same on every plan. The one exception is federation, which only matters when several catalogs need to come together across a large organisation, so it sits in Enterprise. I want to be upfront that this is a change from what I said. Trying it before you buy@LarsArtmann's point about hitting the paywall before proving the value stuck with me. So:
Existing customersIf you already pay for EventCatalog, I'll talk to each of you personally before anything changes. Your current arrangement carries over for about a year before moving to the new pricing. What I'd love feedback on
Thanks again. This has been a genuinely useful discussion. |
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Update: v5 is live Thanks again for all the feedback here. I really appreciate it, and it genuinely shaped where we ended up. We've now settled on a few decisions and v5 is live:
We hope this change keeps EventCatalog sustainable for the long term, and lets us put more back into the project: more people working on it, better support for the community, and the roadmap many of you have asked for. We've also had feedback through other channels outside this discussion: calls, emails and conversations with customers and teams using EventCatalog. It's been genuinely well received and understood, and a few parts of the final model came straight from it, including the longer evaluation, the Success Programme and the rule that builds never break. The full details, and the reasoning behind them, are in the blog post: Introducing EventCatalog v5: One product, everything included.. The pricing page and licensing FAQ cover whether you qualify and what a licence costs. We look forward to continuing with EventCatalog, delivering the value you need from a project you can trust, and having a great future together. If you think we've got something wrong, tell us here. Thank you 🙏❤️ |
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Thinking out loud: how EventCatalog v5 might be licensed, and why
Status: Exploring, nothing decided ·
I'm pinning this as the one place to talk about this. Please ask and push back here rather than in issues so the conversation stays together. I'll keep it updated and note edits at the bottom.
Where my head is at
I started EventCatalog as a side project to document event-driven architecture as things (services, events, schemas, flows, teams) rather than pages. It's now run every day by hundreds of organisations, many of them large, most of them on the free version. Usage has roughly doubled in the last year, and the way people use it has changed: catalogs are bigger, more teams read them, and more of them are being fed by agents.
The data is also showing me something uncomfortable. EventCatalog has been open core: the catalog is free and MIT, and the paid tiers were integrations and automations. AI is eating the value of those paid features. A custom generator against the SDK is now a short job for anyone, and most of you who run EventCatalog every day never used the paid integrations anyway. At the same time, the value people get from the tool itself is going up. So I'm in a weird place: the thing I charge for is worth less every month, and the thing that's worth more is free.
Open core has always felt a bit odd to me for that reason. You spend your time deciding what's free and what's paid, and the line never sits in the right place. What if I stopped trying to draw that line and let everybody get the whole of EventCatalog?
What I've been weighing
Charge per user, or per resource. This is what most tools do. I don't want to. Per-seat pricing means someone at your company deciding who is and isn't allowed to look at the architecture, which is the opposite of what EventCatalog is for. Per-resource pricing means you pay more the better you document, and every service, event and schema you add makes the bill bigger. I want you to document everything and get value from it, not ration it. Both also need metering, and EventCatalog is self-hosted by design because your architecture is sensitive. I don't want it phoning home about what's in your catalog, and I don't think you'd want that either.
Close the source. Would work commercially, and would throw away the community, the contributions and the transparency that make EventCatalog something a large organisation can trust inside its walls. No.
Hosted only. Keep everything free and charge for a cloud version. Most of you want to self-host, and for good reason: your architecture knowledge should remain yours. I don't want to store it, and keeping things self-hosted keeps them simple for you and for me. So this isn't a model I want to explore at the moment.
Keep going as I am. I've thought hard about this one. If I change nothing, the project keeps growing in usage and the business underneath it doesn't, and at some point that catches up with a one-person project. I believe EventCatalog can get somewhere much bigger than it is, and be far more useful to everyone using it. Doing nothing means it doesn't get there. So doing something now makes sense to me, and I'd rather think about it in the open.
So what does that leave? Possibly a commercial licence to use EventCatalog in your organisation, if your organisation is above a certain size. Everyone else gets everything, free.
What I'm considering
The shape I keep coming back to is the Business Source License 1.1, which is a source-available licence with a fixed date on which each version becomes open source. After a lot of thought, it's the option I think best balances the needs of the EventCatalog community, the people using it, contributing to it, and the consultancies and partners building on it, with the financial sustainability I need to keep building and maintaining the software properly.
There's also a way in which this would be more open than what we have today, not less. Under open core, the paid integrations and features have been closed: licence-keyed, and not something you could read or change. Under BSL, all of it would be public. Every line of EventCatalog, including everything that was previously behind a plan, would be there to read, copy, modify and redistribute, free to use in production for the large majority of organisations, and MIT for everyone four years after each release. More people would get more rights than they have now. The only thing it asks in return is that organisations above a certain size pay for a licence, which is what keeps the company behind the software viable. Roughly:
This isn't a new idea. It would put EventCatalog on a path similar to a number of companies in recent years: Sentry, HashiCorp, FingerprintJS and CockroachDB have all moved to the Business Source License, and MariaDB, who developed it in 2013, still use it. CockroachDB in particular landed on the same shape I'm describing: everything included, free for companies under $10M in annual revenue, a licence above that.
To be clear, that would make v5 source-available, not open source, and I wouldn't call it open source. The source stays public, you can read it and modify it, and every version converts to MIT on a fixed date. That feels like the fairest arrangement available for a project that needs to fund itself, but I'm interested in whether you see it the same way.
Why revenue brackets
I don't want to rip anyone off. Pricing by the size of your organisation feels fair to me: a $5B company with forty teams on EventCatalog gets a lot more from it than a twelve-person startup, and can afford to give something back so the project keeps improving for everyone and so I can grow the team building it. A startup under $10M pays nothing, and shouldn't. It's the same idea Duende took with IdentityServer and Docker took with Desktop, and it's the one that seems to fit a self-hosted tool maintained by a small team.
What I'd want to commit to if I did this
For larger organisations
I know a $2B company doesn't buy something to find out if it works. So alongside the 60-day evaluation, I'm exploring a "prove the value" option: a fixed-scope engagement where one team installs and runs EventCatalog properly, with a sponsor, agreed success criteria and my help, beyond the trial and before anyone commits to an organisation-wide licence. If you'd find that useful, or you'd do it differently, tell me.
What I think the consequences would be
Some organisations over $10M would stay on v4 rather than pay. That's a legitimate choice and v4 will keep working. My job would be to make v5 worth the upgrade, not to force it.
Consultancies working for clients wouldn't need their own licence; the client's status would decide. Bundling EventCatalog into something you sell or host for others would need a separate agreement, as it does in practice today.
Where I want v5 to go
If a licence pays for the roadmap, it's fair to say what the roadmap is. I want EventCatalog to be the system of record for your architecture that both people and agents read: the place an engineer, or a coding agent, checks before changing an event, a service or a contract. That means making the catalog load-bearing rather than descriptive: drift detection that can block a pull request, governance rules that can fail a build, MCP as the way agents understand your architecture before they touch it, and the editor and visual tooling that make the catalog easy to keep true.
The integrations wouldn't go away. They'd become free, SDK-backed examples of how to feed the catalog, which is what they should have been all along.
The other thing a licence would pay for is people. EventCatalog is still mostly me, and I want to stay bootstrapped: no outside money deciding what the roadmap is or who the product is for. What I'd do with licence revenue is reinvest it in the project itself: grow a small team so releases, support and documentation don't depend on one person's week, put more into the community that's carried this project for years, and keep improving the product for everyone using it, including all of you on the free tier. The point of the change isn't to extract more from EventCatalog; it's to put more back in.
Your thoughts
I'd love your feedback on this, and I mean that. The threshold, the bands, the evaluation length, the prove-the-value idea, whether BSL is even the right licence: none of it is decided, and this thread is where I'll be reading.
Thank you for using EventCatalog, and for reading this far.
— Dave
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