Never heard of Directus before, but the title seems misleading. They mention:
> We are in the process of crafting a solution to this unfortunate reality, but we still have some work to do. In the meantime, to rein in our infrastructure costs, we've paused the ability to create new Community Cloud projects. Existing Community projects remain unaffected, and of course, you can still try Directus by self-hosting it on your own infrastructure.
What we found is that the success of our free cloud service led to a doubling of our infrastructure costs in just one month. And while this is to be expected based on our cloud activity, we were put in the difficult position of how to cover this large (and still snowballing) expense.
They just admit they basically never thought about how they'd have to pay for it?
I think the more charitable interpretation is more people signed up for the free option than they expected and fewer people converted. The post specifically calls out companies with large resources refusing to pay.
Perhaps it was naive, but that's the bet all freemium companies make. Venture-backed ones can just generally sustain losses for longer. They may never even need to be profitable if they can sell the company based on number of active accounts. It's hard to compete with free.
It sounds like they're being pretty respectful to their existing user base. Despite facing growing costs of their updated infrastructure they're still keeping existing cloud projects (despite this misleading post title). They cite not receiving support and funding from larger orgs using their work for free. They're keeping it open to new users to engage with their tool using their own infrastructure. The fact that their own article headline is "Free is not always so free" suggests they are painfully aware of the unfortunate circumstances of the decision. If I was in their position I don't know if I could find a more tactful response to the situation.
It sounds like they had plans for expansion if they were granted the capital they expected, but it sounds like that funding never came.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 18.7 ms ] thread> We are in the process of crafting a solution to this unfortunate reality, but we still have some work to do. In the meantime, to rein in our infrastructure costs, we've paused the ability to create new Community Cloud projects. Existing Community projects remain unaffected, and of course, you can still try Directus by self-hosting it on your own infrastructure.
They just admit they basically never thought about how they'd have to pay for it?
Perhaps it was naive, but that's the bet all freemium companies make. Venture-backed ones can just generally sustain losses for longer. They may never even need to be profitable if they can sell the company based on number of active accounts. It's hard to compete with free.
It sounds like they had plans for expansion if they were granted the capital they expected, but it sounds like that funding never came.