We've Issued 1,000+ Free License Keys. Here's The Story Behind It.

We just crossed 1,000 Open Innovation Grants issued.

That’s over a thousand organizations, startups, nonprofits, individual devs, and researchers are running the full Directus platform for free - unlimited users and no artificial limits on what you can build.

I've been thinking about how to mark what this milestone represents… so here's the story of how we got here!

2011: Going Open Source

Directus was open sourced in 2011 under GPLv3.

WordPress was one of the biggest open source projects in the world (powering a third of the internet), and it ran on GPL, so following that model made sense.

We were pure GPL open source for a decade… community contributions, pull requests, public code, and thousands of people helping shape the project.

By 2017 and 2018, Directus had grown into something much larger than Rijk and I ever expected. The community was growing, adoption was accelerating, and it became clear that if we wanted the project to keep thriving, it needed to evolve beyond a passion project.

We incorporated in 2020, immediately raised a seed round, and later a Series A in 2022 to build the team and infrastructure needed to support that growth.

And that's when we ran into the wall that most open source projects eventually hit.

If you give everything away for free, how do you generate enough revenue to support the team building it?

For most open source projects, that question never really comes up. They stay small, are maintained by a handful of contributors, and become incredible community resources.

But as projects grow, the challenge changes. You can try to bootstrap, raise capital, get acquired, or find some other path to sustainability.

For me, walking away was never an option.

I started building Directus in 2004 (yes… the same year Facebook was founded 🫣). When you’ve spent more than twenty years building something, acquisition stops being a purely financial decision. I’ve turned down opportunities along the way because I still believe in what Directus can become.

2020: Finding a Sustainable Path

First, we relied on sponsorships. In the beginning, it was a great source of side income. But even at our highest sponsorship amount, it wouldn’t have covered even one full-time software engineer's salary.

Then, we tried the open core model: keep the core free… then carve our premium features and charge for them. We tried that, and it kinda worked, but it came with a problem Rijk refers to as a perverse incentive.

When the enterprise features are the revenue, that's where your focus goes. Before long, you're spending most of your time on the icing… and not nearly enough on the cake. The foundational project, the thing that makes Directus what it is, starts getting less attention.

It just wasn’t a model Rijk or I was willing to live with.

So in 2022, we took this problem to our community via GitHub discussions. We laid out the problem, presented three options we thought could help, and thoroughly discussed those and other options that surfaced. In the end, we moved forward with what both the community and our team felt was most viable.

That was the move to the Business Source License (BSL), with a usage grant embedded in it.

I consulted with Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative, on how to structure this while staying true to the open source spirit.

The core idea was this: if you're under $5 million in "total finances" per year, you use it for free. If you're a larger organization, you pay. Same codebase, no fork, no separate enterprise version. Everyone builds on the same thing.

That model solved the perverse incentive problem. It let us work on the core software with the same energy we'd put into everything else… because the core was the product.

But the license itself? Here's what it actually said:

"You may use the Licensed Work in production as long as your Total Finances do not exceed US $5,000,000 for the most recent 12-month period… 'Total Finances' mean the largest of your aggregate gross revenues, entire budget, and/or funding (no matter the source)…"

Ugh… legalese. After that, three years of real-world usage taught us exactly where that language created confusion.

What does "total finances" mean: revenue, VC funding, the parent company or team’s budget? What if someone doesn’t know or can’t share company finances? What counts as "production" versus evaluation??

The threshold was right… but the mechanism was a hot mess.

2026: Simplifying the Model

With Directus v12, we have moved to the Monospace Sustainable Core License (MSCL).

Yes… it’s a custom license. But it is heavily based on the Fair Core License (FCL). The reason we didn’t fully commit to the FCL is because it doesn't allow the code to eventually convert to GPL… which we felt was important.

So we wrote our own license to keep that commitment: every version of Directus converts to GPL-3.0 four years after release.

We also separated the grant from the license entirely.

The Open Innovation Grant is now its own thing. Clean eligibility criteria, simple language, and a quick form to confirm it all.

If your organization has fewer than 50 employees and under $5 million in annual revenue, you get full access to the Directus platform at no cost. Self-hosted with no usage caps, or we can host it for you via Directus Cloud for $99/month in infrastructure fees.

The 50-employee threshold, by the way, started at 25. We raised it to 50 based on community feedback in the weeks before launch. That's how this is supposed to work.

Again… we're not going to pretend we're OSI-certified open source. We have not been for three years now since the shift to BSL. But we are are a platform that is source available and completely free for the vast majority of people who want to use it.

If you're learning, experimenting, building a startup, running a nonprofit, or growing an independent project, the Open Innovation Grant exists so that cost is never the reason you don't use Directus.

We launched this new license on June 1st, and there are already over 1,000 organizations, individuals, and hobbyists building for free on it. Love it.

Are we there yet?

Has the journey been perfect? Nope.

We’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way, like our inability to sustain our free community cloud offering (though, I’m still pushing to bring this option back!). But we’ve learned from every single misstep, and have continued building towards our single north star: profitability.

The path we're walking isn't one many software companies have tried. Not fully open source by the OSI definition, but not abandoning that ethos either. Sustainable enough to keep an awesome team building… and accessible enough that nearly the entire community that made this project what it is can still use it free and without restriction.

Finding that balance isn't easy, but it's the balance I care about, and it's the one we'll keep refining as we grow!

If you qualify, apply at directus.com/oig. The form is super short and the access is immediate.

And if you have thoughts, feedback, edge cases, or anything else… you know where to find me.

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