A new commercial policy in 2025 for Heptapod

What changes right now?

• The final Heptapod 17.6 versions (17.6.1, released last week as of this writing) will not be pushed to Docker Hub, but access will be granted free of charge. Please follow the Registration procedure of the general download page.
• Heptapod 17.6.0rc1 is publicly available on Docker Hub, as will also be 17.7.0rc1 (expected on Jan 23rd, 2025) and future release candidates.
• All updates for versions up to 17.5, if any, will be pushed to Docker Hub.

Transition to the paying model

Registration alone will be enough to download the Docker images during the first quarter of 2025. This will give us time to work on the terms and conditions, taking the feedback of our user base into account, and to work on the subscription process.

Starting probably early in the second quarter, we will start charging for access, with a target price tag of €300 per month (excluding taxes).

We are still working on many practical aspects of this move. To list a few:

• to keep the accounting and sales overhead low, the first incarnation will likely be in the form of a year's worth of subscription (hence €3600, excluding tax), payable in advance.
• we are thinking of making the subscription an orderable item on our corporate web site. This will also make it easy for our customers: no need to engage in discussions or anything.
• we will probably need to provide a simpler registration process
• we recognize the need to just give the product a try. That is why we will keep on publishing the release candidates.

Why we came to this decision

The maintenance costs for such a complex software project as Heptapod require a steady stream of revenue. Keeping up to date with GitLab, our upstream, providing bug fixes when needed, maintaining several branches and releasing security updates in a timely manner, always ready for easy installation… all these take significant engineering time that has to be compensated for the project to be sustainable.

We have been previously relying on one hand on gracious sponsoring (first and foremost through employment by Octobus before March 2024 and then by Cloudcrane) and on the other hand on our commercial support offering. But that is not enough, and besides, it creates a skewing in our user base, with only some of our users partaking in the maintenance effort.

We realize also that many organizations need a clearly defined product that they can actually purchase. That is why we intend to ask for payment in exchange of access to our production-grade Docker images.

This does not change the fact that Heptapod is Free and Open Source software, as people will still be free to access the sources and either install from them or perform their own binary builds. Heptapod will keep on being self-hosted as public projects on foss.heptapod.net

The price we are seeking for access to the Docker images is €300 per month (excluding taxes). We believe it is a fair price for all the work involved in producing them.

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