We’re Making the OIG Perpetual and Clearer

In April, we announced that we were evolving our license for long-term sustainability from Directus v12 onwards and as part of those changes, introducing the Open Innovation Grant (OIG) to keep Directus free to use for individuals and organizations under $5m annual revenue and 50 employees threshold.

As with any significant change to a process, there were learnings throughout the transition and lots of feedback received. Within two months, we had issued over 1,000 OIG license keys and reflected on the ways we could help simplify the grant in practice.

With that in mind, we’ve adjusted the legal agreement and built an FAQ page to help better understand the grant. Based on feedback from real world usage, friction points and common questions, we hope these updates will strengthen the understanding of eligibility and demonstrate our commitment to the innovators the grant is aimed at. The product team have been gathering all the community feedback and collating the confusion to turn into a helpful document for guidance on the grant.

You can read about the Open Innovation Grant FAQs in full, which I encourage everyone to do, but I would also like to call out some of the main points of clarifications.

• The OIG license is now granted in perpetuity. No renewal process is required and the license is issued with no expiration date. Previously granted keys have already had their expiration removed.
  
  

• We will not and can not terminate your grant license for anything other than cause, meaning the eligibility information you gave us was inaccurate, you no longer qualify, or the grant terms are being violated. We can’t withdraw a license from a compliant grantee, so whether you keep using it stays in your hands. You can terminate for convenience at any time by giving us notice.
  
  

• Grant eligibility is based on the companies that use the Studio. If only you are logging in and your employee count is less than 50 and your annual revenue is less than $5 million, you qualify and can use an OIG license. If your client logs in, they must also have an annual revenue less than $5 million and less than 50 employees.
  
  

• People who interact with your application, even where your app authenticates them against Directus behind the scenes, aren’t Studio users. They don’t count toward eligibility, and the grant has unlimited seats regardless.
  
  

• Each grant key includes 5 activations, designed to cover one project’s environments — local, dev, staging, production, plus a spare. Running multiple projects? Apply for a separate free key per project. An activation binds to your project database and PUBLIC_URL, not to containers, so replicas and autoscaling share one activation. Always deactivate a license before destroying an instance, or the slot stays consumed. We plan to make it easier to manage activations in the future.
  
  

• We reserve the right to periodically review our OIG grantee registry to ensure folks are using the grant honestly. We don’t currently have any plans to strongly police eligibility, as abuse has not been rampant. If we ever have questions about a grantee’s usage, we will make multiple attempts to reach out to clarify the situation and find a mutually agreeable conclusion. As a method of last resort, if it is clear that there are violations of the agreement we reserve the right to disable a license key.

We’ll still be adding to these clarifications as different needs come in, if you have a suggestion, please do let us know. Lastly and importantly, we’d like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share their thoughts, feedback and questions so far in response to these changes. Directus community members don’t shy away from asking the tough questions or having in depth conversations and it makes us stronger for it so we appreciate it all. If you have any questions on the above, or Directus in general, the forum is open and ready.