Your pricing page does not have any prices so it's hard to tell. I'll definitely keep an eye on your progress though.
Your connector as container approach is interesting although i think IT departments may have issues with an on prem solution that spawns other containers by itself.
One more thing - how will you protect yourself from let's say AWS forking you and selling a managed airbyte version?
The pricing depends on the number of connectors you need (but not the volume of data), the features you use, and the SLA. We already saw that there was a great willingness to pay, so we’re not really worried about that part. We will learn a great deal about that next year. Our sole focus in 2021 is the open-source part of the project, and becoming the new standard to replicate data.
Regarding cloud providers as AWS, there are several things we can do to monetize this part with them (including with “Powered by Airbyte”). But, honestly, that would be a great problem, as it would indicate that we’ve become the standard way to replicate data.
The pricing depends on the number of connectors you need
It's not uncommon for even small companies to have as many as a dozen sources. This sort of pricing schema can hurt smaller companies with low data volume but many sources (think e-commerce, especially in the era of "headless").
Very true. We're thinking about offering some kind of volume-based for small companies but with a limit that we won't go over. There are some solutions and we will try to offer the pricing the most adapted to the needs of our users. It will be an iterative process for sure!
Building connectors is a 1000-paper cuts problem. The community will encounter more of these edge cases than anyone who keeps a version of the connector internally and tries to improve it without contributing back.
With this in mind, GPL would bring no additional benefit, it might actually be a friction point for adoption in some organizations.
Comments
Your pricing page does not have any prices so it's hard to tell. I'll definitely keep an eye on your progress though. Your connector as container approach is interesting although i think IT departments may have issues with an on prem solution that spawns other containers by itself.
One more thing - how will you protect yourself from let's say AWS forking you and selling a managed airbyte version?
The pricing depends on the number of connectors you need (but not the volume of data), the features you use, and the SLA. We already saw that there was a great willingness to pay, so we’re not really worried about that part. We will learn a great deal about that next year. Our sole focus in 2021 is the open-source part of the project, and becoming the new standard to replicate data.
Regarding cloud providers as AWS, there are several things we can do to monetize this part with them (including with “Powered by Airbyte”). But, honestly, that would be a great problem, as it would indicate that we’ve become the standard way to replicate data.
It's not uncommon for even small companies to have as many as a dozen sources. This sort of pricing schema can hurt smaller companies with low data volume but many sources (think e-commerce, especially in the era of "headless").
Very true. We're thinking about offering some kind of volume-based for small companies but with a limit that we won't go over. There are some solutions and we will try to offer the pricing the most adapted to the needs of our users. It will be an iterative process for sure!
This is a key question. Licensing via GPL-3 would provide some protection against this, so can you explain why you went with MIT?
Building connectors is a 1000-paper cuts problem. The community will encounter more of these edge cases than anyone who keeps a version of the connector internally and tries to improve it without contributing back.
With this in mind, GPL would bring no additional benefit, it might actually be a friction point for adoption in some organizations.