Upcoming IHP Developer Subscription
Hey,
As the time needed for developing and maintaining IHP is growing I’ve been looking for solutions to enable digitally induced to focus on IHP in a more sustainable way. It often happens that open source projects are getting abandoned because the authors no longer have time and resources to keep up with it. As the ecosystem is growing, we want to ensure that this is not happening to IHP.
We’ve found that the best solution is to introduce a paid version of IHP targeted at developers working with IHP in a professional context. When we make a great framework that creates a lot of value for developers, we will have a lot of paying customers. When we have a lot of paying customers, we can be sure that IHP will be actively developed far into the future.
In the open source ecosystems it’s a common expectation that when you want to have a new feature, you need to write it yourself. Or you’re asking the maintainer to spend his free time on implementing the feature. With the new paid version, these roles change a bit: When you’re a customer, you can expect the feature requests to be put on the roadmap, no need to rely on someone’s free time for doing that.
With bugs we have the same story. Instead of just a GitHub issue, it’s now a customer bug. You can expect the bugs to be fixed with the next release. With open source software, you cannot have any expectations as the maintainer is free to do whatever he wants.
Here’s an overview of the currently planned pricing:
IHP will have three editions:
- Basic: IHP as we know it right now
-
Pro:
- For production-ready project’s that are just starting out
- If you’re working with IHP in a professional context, you likely want to upgrade to the IHP Pro version. This way you get features you likely need in production, can vote on the roadmap and reach us for support. It’s still a steal compared to how much time it will save you and your team.
- Having IHP Pro also benefits the community by ensuring that IHP itself will remain well supported for the foreseeable future
- IHP Pro will be free for students and open source projects
-
Business:
- We know that IHP is incredibly valuable for commercial software development. We’ve priced to reflect that.
- The business plan also helps to offer the professional plan at a lower price, so that there’s a low barrier to get started with IHP.
Here’s the big plan in a short form:
- Introduce a IHP Pro subscription
- Use the funding by our new customers to make IHP & the ecosystem a lot better
- Become the well-known best framework for building web applications
We’ll start rolling out the new IHP Pro with the next IHP release and see how it works :-) Happy to hear some feedback on this.
stephenbenedict PROThank you for all of your work. I am just learning about IHP and am definitely interested in using it professionally so it is really important to me that it becomes a sustainable business.
Kirby CMS (https://getkirby.com/) is another project that I use and it has a one-time fee per license (each license is valid for 1 domain) which sustains development on that project. Major version upgrades are paid upgrades. Personally, I prefer this business model over subscriptions since it is simpler (I do not want to have to deal with another monthly subscription, keep track of it in my accounting etc.).
marc PROThanks! I checked out Kirby. Looks similar to Craft CMS. (Also a bit cool to see it's made from some guy in germany :) )
To make things work with a one-time license we'd need to increase the price a lot (a good way to think about this: think about the average salary of a software engineer and how many subscriptions are needed for that). The subscription allows things to work with a more affordable pricing. It's planned that after a year you'll get a fallback license (like e.g. with JetBrains IDEs), so in a way you could buy a yearly plan and then cancel the subscription, that's similiar to a one-time payment (but you'll be stuck on the old version of course and miss out on all the future goodies)
stephenbenedict PROThanks for the clarification. I completely understand regarding the need to price higher or collect over a longer period. IHP definitely has enough value for that.
The pricing model you proposed (like JetBrains IDE) sounds good. It sounds similar to the model used by the Dutch company Sketch: https://www.sketch.com/pricing/
In Sketch's case, however, they offer subscriptions with continuous updates OR a license with only 12 months of updates. Maybe that would be simpler than requiring to subscribe then cancel X months later if you do not care about updates.
its a good idea , but:
- seems like its going to throw off lots of people and potential contributors.
- i mean already the few users that are getting into haskell would want to use it in real world projects.
- i believe ihp has to grow its audience more and create a stable contributors community .
- the workflow which is still in progress will make devs whom ihp helped , donate or contribute more than expected monthly payments .
after all you need to make money while doing some serious labor but ihp isnt even in it's 1.0 form yet
stephenbenedict PROMy understanding is that IHP is production-ready even though its version is still in pre-1.0 stage, so charging for commercial use I think is appropriate. Though I hope that the IHP source for the "Pro" and "Business" plans is made available for testing in a development environment before purchase. That would be very crucial to me since for some client projects I would need to check out IHP's detailed implementation or actually build a few things with it first in order to confirm if I can use it with the client project or not.
Pfalzgraf Martin I have a few questions:
What license will the code provided for Pro and Business be under?
If I build a website with IHP and ship that to my client, will they still need to pay those monthly fees to use the code?
Lets say I'm building a website with IHP and I stop my subscription. Does that mean I lose access to all of the plans features or just the updates?
When you say "up to 20K revenue" does that apply to me the developer or the client?
marc PROThanks! Good questions.
What license will the code provided for Pro and Business be under?
In short: similiar to MIT but requires a subscription or fallback license and you cannot publish the code in the open. You can read the full license file contained inside the IHP Pro repo here: https://gist.github.com/mpscholten/11e0cacf0070303f6d1aad1810d3ec57
If I build a website with IHP and ship that to my client, will they still need to pay those monthly fees to use the code? Lets say I'm building a website with IHP and I stop my subscription. Does that mean I lose access to all of the plans features or just the updates?
The binary can still be run. The IHP license is only needed for development.
If you don't have a fallback license (you have subscribed for less than 12 months): You cannot make new builds of the software unless you continue your subscription or downgrade the project to IHP basic.
If you have a fallback license (you have subscribed for 12 months or more): You can continue to make builds on the old version as you have access to it via the fallback license.
In both cases the client doesn't need to pay for a license as long as the client is not developing it himself. Only the developer needs a license.
When you say "up to 20K revenue" does that apply to me the developer or the client?
That applies to the developer / owner of the license.
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As I also mentioned on Slack: I have no doubt that this is a great decision. As I am going to be pursuing IHP-lancing in the near future, I could wish for nothing better than having Marc/Digitally Induced as a part of my extended development team 😄