Proxmox Dev here, albeit personally speaking here, so do not make more out of it than the educated opinion this is.
No, I do not think we leave much money at the table.
In short, we're targeting enterprise users with a mix of a (soft) stick (e.g. pop-up to note that one isn't having the most production ready experience) a carrot (way better tested updates and depending on the level also enterprise support).
Homelab users aren't in the target of our subscription services at all, and if we'd target them with cheap prices that would be just misused by companies too, we know this for a fact because the project is over 15 years old, and there was a lot tried out before getting to the current design.
And while there might some protection mechanisms we could set up, we rather avoid DRM'ifying Proxmox projects and avoid wasting time playing cat-and-mouse games with entities trying to abuse this.
Note though, that we still cater to the homelab in other ways even if it isn't our main target audience, like being very active on our community forums for all users, or simple having 100% FLOSS software, no open-core or other, in my opinion rather questionable, open source models.
And the price of a pop-up or using the still very stable no-subscription repository is IMO also quite small compared to the feature on gets 100% for free.
If one wants to contribute to our project but either cannot, or does not want, to afford a subscription, then I think helping out in the communities, submitting elaborate bug reports and thought out feature requests, spreading gospel at the companies they work with/for is not only cheaper for them, but also much more worth for the project.
ps. The actual license is the AGPLv3, which is always free, what we sell are subscriptions and trainings for additional services.
Thanks for the reply. I guess if the enterprise repo is the primary reason most organizations buy a subscription (implying that your existing subscriptions are already skewed toward the community license), and you added a homelab-tier subscription that also offered it, you might indeed see some cannibalization. I'm not sure what "complete feature-set" means—the free offering already seems pretty complete to me, though obviously my use case is not very demanding.
Still, I wonder how many homelab users would be willing to pay something like $10-20/yr (or maybe a one-time license purchase) just to make the nag dialog at login go away. I certainly would, just as I've paid for shareware-style licenses in the past simply because I wanted to support the developer, and not because they made their software unusable if I didn't.
Either way, thanks for your excellent work on Proxmox.
> I'm not sure what "complete feature-set" means—the free offering already seems pretty complete to me, though obviously my use case is not very demanding.
I worded that part a bit oddly (sorry, not a native speaker), I meant that one already gets all features, as we don't do any feature gating or the like.
I.e., you can use all features of the software with or without subscription, the latter only provides extra services.
> Still, I wonder how many homelab users would be willing to pay something like $10-20/yr (or maybe a one-time license purchase) just to make the nag dialog at login go away.
Actually the "stick" part of the carrots and stick design is just as important for enterprise users, as surprisingly a significant amount of enterprise user do not care of not getting any software updates ("it's enterprise, it just needs to magically work, even for new unforeseen events!11!!1"), and the subscriptions and enterprise repo existed before the nag, I cannot share all details, but you will have to believe me that it made a big difference. It also showed that a lot of companies are willing to pay for projects supporting their infrastructure, but they need to be made aware of the possibility quite actively.
But yeah, I can understand the opinions of the home lab community here, but I also hope that I could convey that the current system was carefully optimized over many years for our business case, and that means, that it can pay a (nowadays not so small amount of) developers salaries to extend, maintain and support the growing amounts of Proxmox projects.
If anybody that stumbles over this still does not believe in the necessity of the system, or know how it will be better if we do XYZ (how, if you have zero insights in our data and obviously do not run your own company doing this?), I just have to be blunt and recommend just using an alternative, for PVE et al. the single nag on login is the price you pay to get a full-blown cluster & hyper-visor stack.
> or maybe a one-time license purchase
I feel already like some FLOSS evangelist, but that's something I just have to correct: we sell no licenses at all, our projects are, and will stay, AGPLv3 licensed. And w.r.t. the same question for a life-time subscription with a one-time fee, not planned, reasons: see above.
btw. thanks for the discussion, most often I read this more in the demanding voice, which is hard to stay polite when responding – that wasn't the case at all here.
I actually read that off the website—not your fault at all!
> Actually the "stick" part of the carrots and stick design is just as important for enterprise users, as surprisingly a significant amount of enterprise user do not care of not getting any software updates ("it's enterprise, it just needs to magically work, even for new unforeseen events!11!!1"), and the subscriptions and enterprise repo existed before the nag, I cannot share all details, but you will have to believe me that it made a big difference. It also showed that a lot of companies are willing to pay for projects supporting their infrastructure, but they need to be made aware of the possibility quite actively.
That's funny, but makes total sense. Thanks for the responses!
No, I do not think we leave much money at the table.
In short, we're targeting enterprise users with a mix of a (soft) stick (e.g. pop-up to note that one isn't having the most production ready experience) a carrot (way better tested updates and depending on the level also enterprise support). Homelab users aren't in the target of our subscription services at all, and if we'd target them with cheap prices that would be just misused by companies too, we know this for a fact because the project is over 15 years old, and there was a lot tried out before getting to the current design. And while there might some protection mechanisms we could set up, we rather avoid DRM'ifying Proxmox projects and avoid wasting time playing cat-and-mouse games with entities trying to abuse this.
Note though, that we still cater to the homelab in other ways even if it isn't our main target audience, like being very active on our community forums for all users, or simple having 100% FLOSS software, no open-core or other, in my opinion rather questionable, open source models. And the price of a pop-up or using the still very stable no-subscription repository is IMO also quite small compared to the feature on gets 100% for free.
If one wants to contribute to our project but either cannot, or does not want, to afford a subscription, then I think helping out in the communities, submitting elaborate bug reports and thought out feature requests, spreading gospel at the companies they work with/for is not only cheaper for them, but also much more worth for the project.
ps. The actual license is the AGPLv3, which is always free, what we sell are subscriptions and trainings for additional services.