Electric v3 license change
by Dustin Getz, 2024 Oct 20
With Electric v3 we think we’ve built something valuable, and important. As you know, Electric has not just been a passion project for me, it is the business of my company Hyperfiddle. We are a team of four engineers dedicated to making Electric the best it can be, and building out the next frontier of abstractions on top of it. We’ve historically used venture capital to fund Electric’s development costs—4 team years, do the math!—but the seed market has tightened, and we realized that it’s in everyone’s interest to maintain a strong and ongoing investment in Electric that is decoupled from VC. That’s why with v3 we’re changing the licensing model to a source available business license:
1. Free “community” license for non-commercial use (e.g. FOSS toolmaker, enthusiast, researcher). You’ll need to login to activate, i.e. it will “phone home” and we will receive light usage analytics, e.g. to count active Electric users and projects. We will of course comply with privacy regulations such as GDPR. We will also use your email to send project updates and community surveys, which you want to participate in, right?
2. Commercial use costs $480/month/developer (33% startup discount). No login or analytics (obviously unacceptable for security and privacy), instead you’ll validate a license key (like Datomic). We also offer support and project implementations and are flexible with fee structure (i.e. services vs licenses). For free trials at work, use the community version with your work email. Talk to us, we will arm you to make the case to management.
Special deal for bootstrappers: FREE until you reach $200k revenue or $500k funding. Just use the community license, and come tell us what you’re doing.
What are we trying to accomplish with this change?
This works best if I just tell you what we want, and then you can decide if that matches what you want, and we either collaborate or we don’t.
1. We want to keep the project alive, because it is delivering incredible real world results. VCs don’t like Electric, and think we aren’t making progress fast enough on our actual product. And consulting is too precarious to fund a team of 4 without a fallback source of cash.
2. We want to use the market to identify serious collaborators, so we can focus our time and energy on supporting people who will support us back, and together deliver projects that are far greater than the sum of our individual efforts. This change has already strengthened our partnerships with the users who value us the most.
We believe it is possible to build billion dollar products with tiny teams.
Hyperfiddle’s mission is to collapse to zero the cost of business process UI development for a huge range of apps from enterprise applications to throwaway internal tools. Electric was born not out of genius, but out of relentless pursuit of the question, what is the essential computational structure of such applications? How can we raise the abstraction ceiling with composable/declarative infrastructure that is embedded in the messy commercial reality of a real world business?
These questions are too large for one person. Every leap forward we have made, every insight, I cannot claim as mine. It is all the result of years—a decade—of deep collaboration with brilliant individuals. This is why we have historically opened the project as much as possible – giving talks, releasing source code, cultivating relationships. To us, community is not a gift. It is a trade.
In pursuit of this mission, for this next stage, we are most interested in collaborating with two kinds of people:
1. Visual tool builders and FOSS library makers: come collaborate with us so we can together demonstrate compelling results that are far beyond the abstraction ceiling of today.
”It was the most nerve racking test I’ve ever been on. The lead dev didn’t think it would work, he didn’t think Electric would handle the 20hz server->client realtime streaming of industrial robot events needed for the digital twin observability UI, and he didn’t think we’d need that anyway for the live customer demo. But in the end, the demo had to be remote, so it was the realtime UI that made it successful! This project couldn’t even exist without Electric, which has performed flawlessly.” — Founder/CEO of industrial robotics vendor
2. Managers of growth stage businesses: your need for internal ops tools is growing faster than engineering can deliver, and clumsy low-code platforms struggle to express your deeply customized business processes. We offer you accelerated business process application delivery, in exchange for the financial security of the project and my team, and the value of anchoring the project in the messy reality of your real world business.
”development speed is mind blowing—rich functionality in very little code—features you just wouldn’t bother with if you had to write a REST API for that—realtime updates—interactive features—the speed with which this application came together is just mind boggling” — Series B CTO, healthcare
These two kinds of collaborators that we seek match the two licenses that we offer.
FAQ
Professional devs already using Electric v2 at work: I already talked to everyone I know in this set and we’re working it out. Sweetheart deals were made. If you’ve been using Electric v2 at work without our knowledge, and Electric v3 is important to you, then DM me, lets get on zoom and work it out. Smoking out anonymous commercial usage is an intentional consequence of this change. We are looking forward to learning how you want to use Electric.
”Phone home” means what exactly? Basically what Intellij IDEA pro edition does, you login to activate and they get light analytics to understand their install base, e.g. to count monthly active users. We do not currently know how many active users Electric has, which is a huge problem when trying to determine how much more capital we can risk on this project, and where best to invest it.
A paid web framework LOL, another one bites the dust you really think people will buy this? Actually, our VIPs already did:
”Spontaneously I’m all for this. I’ve been trying to talk you into accepting money for it before.”
”The $480/mo is a non-issue, we save so much more”
”btw, I’m happy y’all are taking a commercial route. I want this to not die lolol”
”We’ll be among the first to upgrade. I can’t wait to be done with TypeScript and Python as daily drivers.”
”I’m 100% in favor of it being sustainable for you to work on Electric.”
”YES, we want you to succeed, building with Electric feels fantastic, hard to imagine using anything else”
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