About two years ago, we were clinking glasses to bagging the #1 spot in our category on GitHub. If you haven't seen the lowdown of how we got there, check it out. It ranked at #1 on Hacker News.

We have come too far from that to remember a lot of the details without clicking through our company wiki. What we do remember and what will offer a shorter, hopefully more insightful ringside view to, is how we have stayed at the top on GitHub despite community backlash, trolling, and tectonic movements in our industry.

Strap in.

"So, where's Plane at today?"

Like any other software start-up, we get our fair share of investor meeting requests. We politely decline most of them. The few that we do take out of curiosity begin with, "Paint your state today in numbers."

Let's do that then.

We are grateful for those numbers. We didn't think we would get here in just two years. We can connect the dots that got us here on hindsight, though.

• We have shipped 467 features to the Community Edition.
• We have closed 65% in the favor of our community.
• We respond to our community's feedback and support requests in under 3 hours.
• The Community Edition has zero borrowed code from any of our other editions.
• We have survived the scrutiny of the harshest open-source defenders.

Most of our paying customers, including some pretty big global brands, started on the Community Edition before upgrading to the Commercial Edition and a plan of their choice. Our community today is vocal in their appreciation for our stance balancing the original open-source edition with the monetized Commercial Edition.

But that wasn't always the case. Our community at one point nearly gave up on us, some of our earliest customers were unhappy with our packaging, and at least one of our competitors was trolling us on the back of the negativity available in plenty.

Unpopular decision #1: Pulling SSO out of the Community Edition

I know how that sounds already, but there's more to this than appears on first read.

On Jan 12, 2024, we backpedaled on a really popular feature request—SSO via OIDC and SAML. I say backpedaled because we had previously promised the feature would come to the edition. You can see how the debate unfolded on GitHub.

Was it right of us to backpedal? No, not at all

Was it right for the community, our customers, and the company? A hundred-percent yes

The big takeaway was that you can't backpedal when you are building in the public, but there were a few others and it did work out in the end.

• Don't make promises you can't keep.
  Outside of how much of a platitude that sounds like, you just can't backpedal when you choose to build in the public. Despite the decision being right then and more so now, we did lose our community's faith for a bit and for that, we hold only ourselves responsible.
• Listen to the quiet many, not the vocal few.
  Building in public shouldn't mean mortgaging the future to please the present. We listened beyond the loudest threads and oriented around the quiet majority who needed a dependable product for tomorrow more than a brittle promise of today.

Unpopular decision #2: The One experiment

In the wake of the SSO episode and per our promise of making our earliest paid features very affordable, we launched Plane One, a $799 lifetime license with two years of updates and support. It was our honest attempt to give smaller teams predictability without losing the commercial oxygen the company needed back then.

To our immense relief, it worked like magic for most of our customers and in all the obvious ways.

• Several hundred thousand dollars in revenue at nearly $799 per seat
  There were a few early-bird discounts
• First revenue-market fit
• Validation of a long-held belief that the larger community was willing to pay reasonable dollars for meaningful value
• Roughly 99% buyer satisfaction

Our community members stayed, upgraded, shipped, and brought other people to build on Plane.

But the overall model started cracking up in the places you only see at scale. One high-touch customer could create the support load of 25 low-touch teams.

The asymmetry made it impossible to staff and plan in tech and non-tech support.

Customer requests languished on Discord, actual customers started churning out despite the one-time payment, there was backlash, a competitor rode the backlash, and a few home-lab expectations restarted the debate, "Why isn’t everything free?”

None of that changed the previous insight. The larger, quieter community wanted Plane to be sustainable.

So we did the grown-up thing.
We sunset One earlier this year, kept our word on updates and maintenance, and moved new demand to a model that aligns service with usage.

Aside: The old OSS playbook is dead. And that's okay.

There’s a comforting myth that open-source projects can thrive on one-time licenses and paid support alone. They rarely survive, as is evident from the open-source graveyard, and certainly not competitively, let alone against proprietary SaaS.
Take an example from OS software, the category that champions open-source like no other.
Canonical charges for enterprise subscriptions—not just support hours but also hardened builds, SLAs, and long-term upkeep. That’s the real cost of shipping dependable, future-proof software.

In 2005 you bought a box. In 2025, you buy continuity. Sure, hosting costs have collapsed, but value delivery hasn’t.

Subscriptions aren’t a tax. They’re how you keep the lights on so you can continue to offer truly open-source editions to those who truly benefit from it.

Launching Pro on two editions and why pricing tracks value, not hosting

Way before we decided to sunset One, we launched Pro both on our Cloud and our self-hosted edition.

It wasn’t a price-gouge for One customers. Less than 5% upgraded to Pro anyway. It was a long-term commitment to our roadmap that has always been driven entirely by current customers' feedback. The plan benefited from our then lessons supporting One and had just two primary goals.

• Get self-hosted Plane to 100% parity with the Cloud if not more.
• Offer the same levels of support regardless of deployment.

But questions poured in, one of which still comes often.

The short answer? The price maps to product value and support, not to where the bits live.

• On our Cloud, your subscription funds infrastructure, reliability, incident response, and a faster feedback loop.
• On self-hosted Plane, your subscription funds hardened builds, upgrade tooling, LTS windows, security patches and advisories, admin workflows, docs, and real support when things go sideways, often with higher per-incident effort because we have less telemetry.

Self-hosting Plane has always been a control decision. You control the privacy, governance, and adherence to compliance. The cloud is an operational decision. You get to the value faster, easier, and with zero infra overheads.

Pro serves both with the same product direction and the same momentum so teams can choose the deployment that matches their reality without trading off capability.
We’ll keep Community real. We’ll keep the Commercial Edition worth paying for. That tricky balance is how any open-source project stays alive.

The Jira Data Center whiplash and why it's shaping our future

When Atlassian made their two announcements—first, Jira Server's EOS, then the Data Center sunset—they jolted teams that must self-host. There is no dunking Atlassian. They’re doing what’s right for 99% of their customers.
Our takeaway is simpler—serve the customers they no longer do.

That's a bunch of regulated industries with companies that don't just self-host software, but also need air-gapped environments. That’s the lane we chose. That's the lane we are staying in on top of being an alternative to all cloud-first project management software.

But, for real, where are we today?

The numbers at the top tell one story. The day-to-day tells another.

The Community Edition remains fully independent and truly open-source—no code borrowed from paid editions, no booby-traps to force an upgrade mid-version.

Teams and companies that outgrow Community graduate to Commercial not because we gatekeep features, but because they need the reliability, security, and support envelope that comes with it.

We extend 75%–90% discounts to NGOs, K-12, and education and we’ve generous start-up programs running. We’ll continue to bias ourselves to teams doing real work with real constraints.

That’s how we square open with not-dead.

Balance and Ikigai

I am a big fan of all things Japanese, so let me round this off with a now-cliched philosophy that you must all have heard of.

We are a COSS company. Our mission is to make project management accessible, transparent, and open. We believe in our bones that mission is noble. It translates to having a real Community Edition that stands on its own and is supported by the company, Commercial plans that fund security, maintenance, and the long run, and deep discounts where they matter most.

That’s our Ikigai, the intersection of what we love, what the world needs, what we’re good at, and what the world will pay for.

If you’re building in the open and intend to be sustainable

This is where most open-source projects stumble. The graveyard of open-source startups is depressingly sad—over 500,000 repos that started with promise and ended in silence.
Sustainability is the most under-discussed topic of the open-source conversation. It's nearly taboo to talk about it with the so-called defenders of open-source as if advocating for it must come from an absence of ideals. Contrary to that, it’s how ideals become real.

Here’s the lens we wish we had on day zero.

• Build in the open without bleeding out. Transparency ≠ IOUs. Don’t promise what you can’t staff.
• Price the product, not the rack. Charge for durable value—security, support, continuity—, not where the code lives.
• Serve the majority and guard the roadmap. Edge-case gravity is real. Fight it with "No"s. Your “No” protects the “Yes” your real users need.
• Support must scale. Empathy is infinite. Bandwidth isn’t.
• Open source ≠ free software. It is free as in freedom, not free as in beer.

We broke a few eggs. We upset a few of our earliest members. We kept building anyway. Because in the end, you cannot do right by your community if you are a headstone in the graveyard.

The future won’t reward the loudest thread. It will reward the teams that stay alive long enough to make a dent. Hopefully, that's us and you.