75% open-source projects go to open-source purgatory because maintainers can't keep up with early-adopters' requests for more—more features, more performance, more security.

Commercial open-source software AKA COSS often leaves early adopters behind in the favor of more affluent buyers.

We don't think that's right by early adopters—the rocket-fuel for the earliest growth engines at COSS companies. We don't think it's fair to leave them in the lurch when you find more affluent buyers. It doesn't sit right by us.

Plane is extremely popular already. In talking to you, our earliest adopters, about tiered SaaS-like plans, the one thing that's been repeated more than anything else is your unwillingness to be locked into ongoing pricing commitments just for ease of installation, instance governance, and security controls.

Plane One serves you, the operators of self-managed instances—over 40% of our users today—with a one-time license fee for security and performance essentials all teams need minus the SaaS pricing commitments not all teams can afford. It places no restrictions on projects, issues, storage, or users beyond performance and feature considerations. It lasts a lifetime if you choose to stay on the version you paid for. And it affords us a sustainable business model that doesn't come at the price of leaving you behind. If and when you are ready to upgrade to the next version, choose the next one-time license or one of our tiered plans.

For obvious reasons, Plane One is not for our Cloud users. The same no-restrictions-except-with-users policy applies to them, too, with the exception of Drive and storage, launching sometime soon.

Think of Plane One as a Jira Server license minus the Support fees on your existing versions or the headache of package choices. We aren't trying to reinvent parts of that pricing wheel that worked for over two decades, just taking out the niggly bits that didn't work for us when we were Atlassian customers.

We also took our inspiration from ONCE.COM , including the name of this plan. It is commendable that one of the most popular names in proprietary SaaS and a bellwether of the SaaS movement opened up a new B2B pricing model, but we see it being right up the COSS alley. We hope to take that baton from Basecamp and run with it in open-source.

Hopefully, this becomes the de-facto first for all other COSS companies, but we are more than happy if it just works for you.

Thank you for reading, for being an early adopter, and for your continued faith. We wouldn't be here without you.