Replies: 10 comments 3 replies
|
The limits for the community edition are way too low. No enthusiast will ever buy this, because it's a product that'll never be more than "nice to have" for the hobby Homelabber, who's just monitoring their Homelab, VPS and maybe an additional Raspberry Pi for fun. But these are the people that'll help development and the brand more than any business client ever would. Business clients however will pay for 24/7 support, incident management, maintenance windows, etc. So please, consider having all the monitoring and agent stuff in the free tier, if you want this to take off. Check out pangolin and their free enterprise license for the community as an example. |
|
I disagree, homelabers would gladly pay to support such a project, but not montlhly and/or not that much. I would propose either a 1€/month or 100€ lifetime offer for homelab or nonprofits, to unlock all features, but no support and prohibit commercial use. The idea is to not harm your business model, but grow your userbase and give more to the community. I guess like that it could indeed be of interest to many a savvy homelaber, at least it would be to me ;-) I had to speak up as I'm about to clone the repo and rid myself of the pro limits to see if they actually work for me, and at the current price once I have gone through that effort I most probably won't go back, but I would actually try to support the project according to my reasonable means if it's an option. |
|
Thanks all three of you for taking the time to write this up, this is exactly the kind of feedback I need at this stage. Some context first: maintenant wasn't built for homelabs originally. I built it for people running production on dedicated servers, freelancers and agencies managing client stacks, teams who know they don't need AWS to host reliably. That's who the Pro tier is priced for, and for that audience 29€/month replaces several tools and pays for itself quickly. That said, you're making a point I can't ignore. The Community caps don't really protect the business model. A company doesn't buy Pro because it hit 10 endpoints, it buys Pro because it needs Slack/Teams alerts, escalation, incident management and a status page it can put in front of clients. The caps mostly create friction for personal use, and @toxic0berliner's comment is the proof: the current setup pushes honest users toward forking rather than supporting the project. That's a bad trade for everyone. So here's where my head is at: a personal, non-commercial license that lifts the Community limits (heartbeats, endpoints, certificates), priced for what it is. No enforcement gymnastics, just a non-commercial clause and trust, the same way Portainer, JetBrains or Unraid handle it. The business features stay in Pro because that's what businesses actually pay for, so nothing gets taken away from anyone. I'm not committing to a price or a date in this thread, I want to think through the details properly rather than improvise licensing in a comment section. But consider the idea accepted in principle. If you have opinions on what "priced for what it is" means to you, or which limits hurt the most in practice, keep them coming, this thread is the right place. Thank you again for your support |
|
I get us homelabers weren't your target. I hope we can be of assistance but can't guarantee it so you'll need to be careful that including us doesn't ruin your time for features or supprt of tooling that's not in your business plan. I don't have the experience or feedback of projects like those you mentioned, I believe you shold continue to gather some metrics and follow up that the trust in the non commercial license is not misplaced. That said the status page and some alerting email or webhooks are of use to us, slack teams incident management and escalation aren't to my knowledge you seem right on that. Personal opinion time : i would value this at 100€ lifetime licence for non commercial use, but I also know friends who wouldn't pay more than 30€ and others not a single cent. If you're familiar with it I would suggest a bit of a gamble: "prix libre" in french, meaning the purchaser decides the proce himself. This is again mostly on trust that people like me who can afford 100€ will do and tjose running it on HW that was given for free and already struggle to fill the fridge might pay 1 or even 0€. I think guessing what is relevant or not for the community is highly complicated and prone to errors. Also maintaining a complex paywall isn't free in dev and test time... So lifting all barriers is I believe the way to go, that said people like CrowdSec have not chosen this route. Lastly I would insist on the support, given your reaction time and speed of implementing new stuff, this is a valuable selling point for businesses so make sure it's clearly not included in the community version and keep up the good work and giving the priority to your paid customers. |
|
@toxic0berliner this is genuinely useful, thank you. On "prix libre": I love the spirit, but as a one-person operation the accounting and payment overhead of variable pricing isn't worth it. So here's the compromise: 99€, lifetime, non-commercial use. And if that's genuinely out of reach for someone running rescued hardware, email me and we'll figure something out. That covers the same ground with a lot less machinery. What the Personal license will unlock:
What stays in Pro: Slack/Teams, alert escalation and routing, incident management, status page management and subscribers, CVE enrichment and the security posture dashboard, advanced Swarm/K8s dashboards. You called it yourself: that's the stuff you need when you're answerable to clients or a team, not when you're monitoring your own rack. And you're right about support, so let me be explicit: Personal comes with no support commitment. GitHub issues, best effort, and PRs are always welcome. My response time goes to paying Pro customers first, that's part of what they pay for. I won't ship this overnight, there's license tooling and payment work behind it, but it's now officially on the roadmap. I'll post here when it's live. |
|
That's awesome. I think 99€/life is a fair price for a software like that and that's something I would pay. Of course, not every homelab user would pay that but enthusiasts that are looking for a software like that would. I did not expect that outcome when I started this thread. |
|
@Gapoly, I’m glad to hear that, and honestly, that’s what these discussions are for. Since we’re being open about this: I’m a senior developer who has created a product, and I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible. But I also need it to be viable. A purely community-driven project relying solely on goodwill wouldn’t allow me to maintain it at the current pace, roll out new features every week and respond quickly to issues. The paid plans aren’t there to put pressure on anyone; they actually enable us to maintain the free version and ensure its active development. So thank you for starting this discussion rather than simply switching to another tool. The ‘Personal’ licence will exist thanks to this thread you’ve started. I’ll post here as soon as it’s available. |
|
Much love towards you ❤️ Aldo considering many forks can be done with minimal efforts with free LLMs I do believe it'll be a win on both sides 👍 I do intend to reach 78 agents to monitor my 70 LXC/VM on 8 physical hosts so I would've hit the limit and would really benefit from this tool it seems. The world of semfhosting has grown anf I'm not even trying everything that peakd my interesy so fleets are becoming more common, and ansible isn't the answer that this project is. Good luck I hope this keeps growing 💗 |
|
I read over my first comment here, and I just want to make sure it didn't come out too harsh. This is a super interesting project for everyone and this is what could potentially make it great. If I were you, I'd probably aim for 90% free Homelab users, 10% paid business users. The way I see it, is like this: The 90% will never pay a dime, but they'll open issues, PRs, provide feedback, discuss features, and much more important: free advertisement. A lot of them will pay you back with valuable information, a few of them will even work on your project for free. The 10% however will pay a lot of money for premium support and Business features. Even if you make some money out of the 90%, they'll never even come close to the business money a mature project will make out of the remaining 10%. So work on scaling these numbers, get the word out for this great tool, get as many users as possible and the business money will find a way towards you. That's my honest opinion, I really hope this takes off because it looks great. |
|
@phil9309 no worries, it didn't read as harsh, it read as someone who cares enough to be direct. That's the useful kind of feedback.
And I broadly agree with your 90/10 model. That's more or less what this thread converged on: the wide base runs maintenant freely or close to it, files issues, sends PRs and spreads the word, while businesses pay for what businesses actually need, support, escalation, incidents, compliance-friendly invoicing.
The Personal license is my version of making the base sustainable without pretending caps drive business revenue, because as you pointed out, they don't.
Where I'd nuance it slightly: I'm one person, not a company with a growth team. So "scale the free numbers" for me means keeping the product excellent and letting people like you three talk about it, rather than chasing user counts. If the tool is genuinely good, the 90% shows up on its own. This thread is early proof of that.
Thanks for hoping it takes off. Me too.
|
|
I thought the discussion is mostly over, but it seems to me that @btouchard is himself unclear about the current limits or I might have missread. Currently with no license there is no way in rhe gui to add any agent. I believe Benjamin though free tier includes 10 agents but it's not available through the gui as it's hidden by the upgrade to pro message... If I am not mistaken that's one more argument for making the paid/commercial as simple as can be I doubt testing the paywall on each release is something fun and worthwhile... I might be wrong but I really feel I had to fork this and lift the limits to use agents and I'll be using way more than 10, running 28 LXCs and counting... |
|
I’m completely clear on the limits, but open to discussion. It’s open source, so you’re free to fork it for your own use. |
|
My bad 😂 i wasn't clear on it and discovered them in steps. |
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
Really love this software for my homelab but it can be limited fast with the free edition and pro edition is way to expensive for a home use.
However, I would gladly pay for a lifetime license Community Edition.
Do you guys agree or you like the current paid version we have?
All reactions