Will Keystatic have a pricing model?

[JedWatson]

I'm posting this because a few people have asked privately when we went into early access:

I wonder what the pricing model will be and what happens with the projects I create. I need to build a few simple websites for clients. Will these remain editable in the future?

Content management systems, both hosted and open source, often start with a free model then switch to "making money" mode, leaving early adopters with unexpected costs to keep maintaining their websites down the track. This can be particularly painful for indie developers and smaller agencies.

Open Source sustainability is also a big issue, and sometimes developers burn out or move on to other things, for many different (and valid) reasons. This is also a risk for early adopters, because they're using a platform they now need to migrate away from.

Software is expensive to develop, and sometimes not paying anything for it can be as problematic as suddenly having to pay for it because the team behind it needs to get paid.

What is the angle here with Keystatic?

[JedWatson]

So first of all, Keystatic is being developed by Thinkmill. We're an Australian software design and development consultancy and have been independently profitable for ten years now. We put aside a portion of our revenue to develop R&D and maintain open source, because it improves everything we do on our commercial projects.

Side note: if you're looking for a team who can help you design, build, ship and maintain software products or design systems, give us a shout! we're really good at it.

We've got a long history of maintaining open source projects well, and keeping them free (see KeystoneJS, our other CMS project)

So it's free, right?

Keystatic is, and will continue to be, free and open source. We're not about to introduce a licensing model that costs you money to use it, and we're comfortable with this commitment.

We're building Keystatic because we have ideas to explore in this space, and because we want to use it ourselves. If it's successful and a whole lot of people use it, that's great! Building cool things and giving them away has always been part of our plan at Thinkmill. Most of our paid work comes to us because people know us (and trust us) from the community.

Forever?

Yep. Forever. Keystatic Core - the whole project today - won't ever become something you need to pay for.

There are two things that are worth mentioning though. First of all, it's not completely free to run. Today, auth happens through a GitHub App which means your users need to be GitHub users, and GitHub has a per-user pricing model. If all your editors are already on GitHub there's no incremental cost; but if you're adding your design team and your content authors or your clients to your GitHub plan now that will mean spending more money with GitHub.

However, you can also run Keystatic without connecting to GitHub (it saves changes to the local disk) and we're planning to come up with more options in the future around this. Making software that scales well is part of our jam.

Second, we have some ideas for things that could make Keystatic even cooler, that involve running servers. We're thinking about things like multiplayer editing, file and image hosting (outside of git) and more. We may or may not launch these ideas, but if we do, they'll have some form of pricing; and if we do, they're be completely additional to the core Keystatic project.

Which means that all the things you see today and in the open source project in the future will always be free, and if we come up with value-add things down the track, they won't compromise or compete with the open source features.

But I love it, and want to help fund it

That's awesome 🤩

(well, nobody has said this yet, but seriously that would be cool)

We might open sponsorship or something similar down the track to help fund the ongoing project. Because we work as a consultancy, we're not completely sure how to balance this yet, but if you are part of an organisation who would be interested in helping fund Keystatic, please let us know because we'd love to have the conversation.