> We’re also toying with the idea of an “enterprise” self-hosted deployment, similar to gitlab’s billing model, and thoughts from the community on this front would be appreciated!
Transparency and an open stewardship of the project can help: https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/ Make it clear what features are paid, and define that for example free features are never moved to the paid tier.
That's a good point; we should be clear about what will always be free. Right now, literally everything is free, but what we'd consider putting behind an enterprise tier that are top of mind are:
- multi-tenancy
- enterprise authentication features (sso, saml, etc..)
Re: the gitlab link you sent, we really like the transparency around not making a free feature paid, and the fact that all tests are OSS.
Overall, we'll work on something like this. Thanks for pointing it out!
Please don’t put basic features behind enterprise licences.
We are a small start up. We use SAML / SSO. We care about security. We care about privacy.
None of this is “enterprise”.
We stopped using competitors to you because of data privacy issues.
We would happily pay for a self host version, where we control all the data recorded.
These type of tools are extremely useful, and it hurts not having it. But they are just way too much of a privacy issue.
Self hosted and paid - is the future of data privacy.
I would love to see you (and others) off these options, it’s really a game changer and makes the switch easy from any product that is not self hosted and collects our customers data.
What do you think of uxwizz.com ? The only option is self-hosted, because focusing on the hosted version would mean competing directly against the self-hosted one, so making self-hosting harder would drive more revenue, which seems wrong.
That's great feedback; understood. What features would you consider "enterprise" in that case? Right now, nothing is paywalled in our self-hosted version, and we're still very much in the brainstorming phase here.
how companies should make money, if AWS can package it any day and sell as a service?
regarding self hosting, how can contributors make sure that you are self-hosting and paying? If code is open and already in your infra there is no way to enforce anything.
> regarding self hosting, how can contributors make sure that you are self-hosting and paying? If code is open and already in your infra there is no way to enforce anything.
The way we're thinking of addressing this is not including the enterprise features in the output binary when you install highlight.io. This makes it a bit harder to actually build the project with all the enterprise features. It it something that folks can take advantage of, though.
I would encourage you to consider not even trying to cripple the freely available self-hosted version. Personally I'm not a fan of open core or the GitLab business model, and Sentry has shown you can build a business without removing needed features from the self-hosted version. While folks may not agree Sentry is "open source" these days, our license effectively achieves the same from a customer pov as yours (which is ideal for customers). More people should take the risk IMO.
Ultimately people do not want to run all their own services if they can pay someone else to run it for them.
Makes a lot of sense. We're going to try to take a bit of a different approach, but no doubt that a successful business (like sentry) can be built w/o the gitlab model!
SSO and SAML are not enterprise features. They are table stakes security wise, and intentionally crippling your security model is a good way of driving off customers that take security seriously, no matter their size.
Absolutely, makes sense. We'll make sure to make all security features we ship a first-class citizen of the open source version and available to all customers.
At the end of the day security costs money. Should security consultants offer their services for free? Should security guards work for free? Should DDoS protection be free even though it uses expensive firewalls and bandwidth? Should security audits be free? Should badge scanners be free?
Adding a "login by google" button costs a few hours of developer time. I've done it myself, it isn't a whole lot of work.
On the other hand, I'm dealing right now with two services (NetSuite and Certify). Both "support" SAML, but they offer no direction on how to set it up or any sort of support for the setup. The documentation that is out there, is out of date and/or incorrect. Even though they offer these as paid additions, they don't really support them.
Anyway, that's where I'm coming from. I'm not trying to get into some deeper meaning debate here.
Thanks for sharing!
> We’re also toying with the idea of an “enterprise” self-hosted deployment, similar to gitlab’s billing model, and thoughts from the community on this front would be appreciated!
Transparency and an open stewardship of the project can help: https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/ Make it clear what features are paid, and define that for example free features are never moved to the paid tier.