Did I just get bamboozled by the words "open source" again?

[Hubro]

My first impression of Tina was that it's much like Strapi, i.e. a self hosted headless CMS, but built on Git and Markdown files. As it was also open source, this sounded extremely interesting.

After spending a couple of hours going through the docs, I'm starting to feel tricked. Is Tina seriously branded as open source when the entire point of the product (i.e. the headless CMS) is a proprietary hosted service?

From the docs I didn't find any reference on how to "go to production" without Tina Cloud. Please tell me I've misunderstood.

[mAAdhaTTah]

See here: #3589

[Hubro]

Thanks for clarifying. I completely understand and agree that corporations shouldn't use software for free and contribute nothing back to the authors. However, unless I've misunderstood something, I would argue that the current "free tier" of Tina is so restrictive that it can only be used for demos and testing.

As soon as you add a blog, news feed, gallery or anything similar, it's only matter of time before even the smallest production website exceeds 500 documents. Many (maybe most?) websites will have dynamic content like that.

If your goal really is that individuals, startups and small companies should be able to use Tina for free, it might be a good idea to tweak the license.

Why not go with a license that says the software can be used for free, but can't be used to create a competing product to Tina Cloud? Plus, provide premium support for enterprise. That feels a lot more in the spirit of open source, smaller users could actually embrace your product and deploy it without constantly looking out for the license limits.

[scottgallant]

If your goal really is that individuals, startups and small companies should be able to use Tina for free, it might be a good idea to tweak the license.

👍 We'll discuss increasing the document limit. @Hubro, do you suspect you'll hit the 500-document limit for your project? If so, feel free to reach out to me in Discord and I'll see what we can do for the time being.

Why not go with a license that says the software can be used for free, but can't be used to create a competing product to Tina Cloud? Plus, provide premium support for enterprise. That feels a lot more in the spirit of open source, smaller users could actually embrace your product and deploy it without constantly looking out for the license limits.

After speaking with a few large companies, we learned that they would often just choose the open-source solution. In the future we might consider going fully open-source (or open-core), especially if we develop proprietary features that could really improve the experience for large orgs and give them a reason to become paying customers.

[Hubro]

do you suspect you'll hit the 500-document limit for your project?

I think all my projects will hit this limit, as long as they include any kind of blog, news feed or similar. It's really just a matter of time, isn't it?

Another alternative could be to remove the document limit. I feel like user count and role count is correlated to company size, but document count will increase over time for most websites.

[scottgallant]

@Hubro, it would be helpful for us to understand what kind of projects you would be working on so we can better understand where you're coming from. Are these marketing sites for small businesses, internal sites at a larger company, personal sites, etc?

Also, would it be helpful if we published pricing for the self-hosted so you knew you weren't going to hit "contact us" wall once you reached any limit? Here's what we're thinking that might look like:

[Hubro]

@scottgallant As an example, my most recent project was a new website for a recurring music festival. This website has a news section, as well as a list of events, sponsors and artists.

This festival is largely supported by volunteers and they don't have much of a budget for their website. Their website hosting bill is around 10$ per month, plus however much they pay SendGrid for their newsletter. They host a large festival annually and several small events throughout the year. I estimate they would break the 500 document limit in around 2 years.

I would never consider using Tina for this project with the current license. For a website with a less active news section it might take longer to hit the document limit, but I would still never consider delivering a website using Tina and impose on the customer to monitor their document count, and a time limit before their hosting bill increases 5-10 fold.