Where things stand
- Free for organisations under 5M USD a year and under 50 people, via the Open Innovation Grant — full platform, no feature gates.
- Headcount means Directus studio seats, not company employees. The users of an app you build on Directus do not count.
- A free Core tier exists for everyone: 3 seats, 50 collections, no SSO or advanced RBAC filters.
- Directus is source-available, not open source, and has been since 2023. Each MSCL release turns GPLv3 after four years.
- v12 instances validate against a remote service every six hours by default and report usage with it.
Is Directus still free?
Yes, for most teams — through the Open Innovation Grant, which covers the full platform with no feature gates. There is also a permanently free Core tier with limits. The detail is below.
Isn’t the “free tier” really just an infinite development trial rather than a tier you can run production on?
Answered by Directus
Staff disagreed: “It has almost all features of the platform and two reasonable limits on users/collections. Nothing that stops you from using it in production.” They summarised: Core/free tier — almost all features, lower seat/collection limits, “normally this tier would be like $20/mo or something at other vendors… it’s not missing, it’s just free”; Paid Teams tier — adds SSO/support and higher limits at a “hundreds of $$” price point; Enterprise — custom pricing, no limits, enterprise features. Plus the free grant (no gates, no limits) and discounts for non-profits/NGOs/OSS/EDU.
Custom LLMs won’t be in the free tier — does that mean you cannot add a local AI to a self-hosted Directus?
Answered by Directus
“Custom LLMs aren’t in the free Core Tier (meant for larger businesses to evaluate and dev)… but custom LLMs ARE included in the free Innovation Grant! So individuals and small orgs can still use it.”
Has the plan changed between the Reddit description of the tiers and the later forum description? If so, what changed and what drove it?
Answered by Directus
“Yes, things have changed since writing some of these posts… that was the point! Originally the Innovation Grant gave you access to the middle tier (with those limits and still missing some features)… but after talking with the community, we updated the grant to include the FULL software and removed all limits. You get everything for free… the ONLY thing we require is that you register and keep basic telemetry turned on.” The grant headcount threshold was also doubled from 25 to 50 employees.
Does the entitlement to disable analytics only exist in the Enterprise tier?
Answered by Directus
“Yup! And the free Core tier has no registration requirement.” (So the two ways to avoid the telemetry are paying for Enterprise, or staying on the limited Core tier.)
Do you qualify for the Open Innovation Grant?
Two thresholds, and you must be under both. Non-profits, universities and schools are handled separately — Directus offers deep discounts there rather than a blanket grant.
Will there be a pricing adaptation too? It’s very hard to justify ~$1k/month for a license plus infrastructure to most of our customers.
Answered by Directus
Yes. Staff described a new middle tier: “we’ve added a tier between Free and Enterprise to have a lower price point than before (think: a few hundred dollars a month, instead of $1k+).” The final layout: free Core tier for evaluation/development with no time limit but low seat caps and no SSO; a Teams tier at “hundreds per month” with all non-Enterprise features; and an Enterprise tier priced on scale with no limits, basic support, and analytics opt-out. Discounts remain available for non-profits, NGOs, OSS projects and educational institutions.
Why tie license cost to company revenue/funding instead of actual usage or seats, the way Adobe, Microsoft 365 or GitHub do?
Answered by Directus
Staff said usage-based models were tried and failed: charging per collection “might lead to bad schemas to save money”; charging on API requests/bandwidth “feels WRONG when people are self-hosting” and is hard to predict; charging on seats fails because “some HUGE mission critical projects just keep a few admins in the studio and pay almost nothing.” The threshold approach was chosen so the majority of users pay nothing: “even a $5/month usage cost could stop a HUGE amount of individuals from using the software. The credit card alone is a BIG blocker, regardless of cost.” Staff also insisted “We are not charging based on company size. We are charging based on software features and project scale (users, collections)” — the thresholds only decide who gets it free.
Does air-gapped or firewalled operation require the Enterprise tier — must organizations behind strict firewalls or with unreliable internet pay Enterprise pricing to run Directus reliably?
Partly answered
Effectively yes: “if you need 'offline mode’ then you would need to pay for the enterprise version of the software when you move into production and need to air-gap.” Offline mode is listed as an Enterprise-tier feature throughout the thread. The related questions about intermittent connectivity on non-Enterprise tiers were not answered.
Does “$5M/year + 50 Employees” mean AND or OR?
Answered by Directus
“It’s an AND! So you need to satisfy both of those to qualify. The thinking is that if you make more than $5M/year or have more than 50 employees… then you are likely at a company stage where you can reasonably afford to pay for the value the software gives.”
The Open Innovation Grant agreement says the grant “expire[s] annually and [is] subject to periodic eligibility reviews” and that the grantee “agrees to provide information reasonably requested by Directus to confirm eligibility.” What does an eligibility review actually consist of? What falls under “information reasonably requested”? Can a review occur outside the yearly renewal? And how exactly is false or inaccurate eligibility information assessed?
Not answered
Who counts toward the 50-person limit?
The question with the most confusion attached, and the one most third-party write-ups got wrong. It counts Directus studio seats — the people who log into Directus itself — not your company headcount and not the users of an application you build on it.
How will educational institutions and non-profits be handled? Most are under $5M annual revenue but have more than 25 headcount, especially counting students or volunteers.
Answered by Directus
Headcount means the formal employee/team of the legal entity. Volunteers and students of educational institutions do not count, the same way external clients or end users of a company do not count. Non-profits, NGOs, research orgs, OSS projects, universities and educational institutions get deep discounts rather than a blanket free grant: “To me, these large enterprise-like orgs (such as American Red Cross, WWF, Wikimedia, Kubernetes, Mozilla, MIT, Harvard, etc) feel more like deep discounts than all-out free usage.” Directus says it has always offered, and will continue to offer, those discounts.
The 25-employee headcount cap is too low — most startups cross it early. Should it be raised (e.g. to 75), or the revenue threshold lowered to $1M instead?
Answered by Directus
Directus doubled the headcount threshold after this discussion: “It was set to 'under $5M/year + 25 Employees’ … but after these discussions we decided to double the headcount. So now you are eligible for the grant if you make less than $5M/year + 50 Employees.” Staff rejected the idea of lowering the revenue threshold, arguing that revenue is hard to use as the sole test because most employees do not know their company’s revenue or are not allowed to share it. A time-based model (free for the first 1–2 years) was also rejected: “To spend our resources trying to get people excited about our platform… but then to wait years for revenue would be the end of our company.”
Does the headcount criterion refer strictly to the licensee’s own employees/contractors, or could it extend to end users in a multi-tenant SaaS deployment?
Answered by Directus
It counts only people with a Directus studio seat — not the end users of your product. “It’s counted against the end user of Directus. End user there means the person or people that have a studio seat in Directus; eg the people that are actively logging in and using the Directus studio to read, create, and manage data.” And later: “The end users are anyone that has access to the studio as a user, so your external SaaS users, even if they’re in the database, are not included, only the system users of the Directus platform studio itself.”
How can I responsibly recommend Directus to clients when the licensing terms could change underneath them after delivery?
Partly answered
“This can happen with literally ANY software at any time. The copyright holder can change licenses, even from OSS to closed, at any point. What is different about Directus here?” Staff also noted existing users can stay on prior releases: “you’re welcome to stay on previous versions of our software… either GPL or BSL. That’s part of the protections of those licenses.” Staff conceded the separate risk of the *grant* being narrowed is more valid, since staying on an old version does not help there, and said they would look into making it more predictable.
Will custom RBAC filters be gated to paid tiers, and will seats and collections be capped in the free tier? That would break multi-tenant architectures.
Answered by Directus
“You get unlimited roles, policies, and custom RBAC on/off per collection in the free tier. Custom RBAC Filters (defining more specific rules) is also free in the grant… but if you are above $5M/year and 25 headcount, then yes, you have to pay to unlock that.” On collections: “There’s a cap of a few HUNDRED collections per project in our free grant.” Later staff confirmed the grant was changed to remove all limits and gates entirely, and that “Everything you would need to run a multitenant SaaS on Directus should be included in the grant. SSO, full custom RBAC+filters, etc.” Also: “All of our tiers still include custom RBAC. We are limiting advanced filters in some tiers.”
Who counts toward the headcount number? If a company has 1000 people but only 3 use Directus, what is the number? What if 10k people use a frontend built on it?
Answered by Directus
Initially: “It’s the headcount of your legal entity. For obvious reasons, we can’t use 'team/dept size’, as you can say whatever you want… but NOT for volunteers or their end customers or external contributors outside the org.” This was later refined to studio seats: the count is against the people who log in to the Directus studio, not API users of a product built on Directus. Staff also noted that a small project inside a large company does not get charged “crazy money” — such teams can use the free Core tier or the Teams tier.
What counts as “competition” under the MSCL? Directus sells templates for use cases like LMS and CRM — is building and selling an LMS on Directus a competitive act?
Partly answered
“We’ll have a more thorough description of the 'competition’ in the MSCL soon… so keep an eye out for that.” No definition was given in the thread. Staff did say custom RBAC remains in all tiers and is unlimited under the grant, so the feature gating was not framed as anti-competition enforcement.
We’re a small agency (under $5M, under 50 staff) with clients whose revenue exceeds $5M. For a self-hosted Directus instance, whose revenue and headcount counts — ours or the client’s?
Answered by Directus
It is counted against whoever holds studio seats. “It’s counted against the end user of Directus. End user there means the person or people that have a studio seat in Directus… In this case if your client is the one logging in to and using your Directus instance, it’s indeed measured against their team.” And where the client never logs in: “Correct! If your end clients aren’t in the studio (just your team) and your team is under the threshold, then that is the free grant!” Rijk added the seat count was introduced precisely because agencies often don’t know a client’s revenue: “it should be easier to retrieve or make a realistic educated guess about your client’s team size than revenue.”
Team size and user count aren’t the same. We have 15,000+ basic users, 50+ tenant admins and 2 admins on a team under 10 people — how is that counted?
Answered by Directus
“That’s why historically we’ve priced against seats and not just all users. We’ve explicitly defined between 'seats’ as users who use the Directus studio for that exact reason… It’s very common to have a lower number of Directus Seats that are used as administrative / content editorial users for your product, and then thousands of 'API users’ that are the individual users of your project.”
For a small non-profit (a German “eingetragener Verein”) with ~700 registered members, ~50 active volunteers, 6 board members, one half-time paid secretary and ~€50,000 annual revenue — do all registered members count toward headcount? Only active volunteers? Only board members? And how does “headcount” translate to other countries?
Not answered
Wasn’t self-hosted supposed to stay free? And who decided the price? $500/month for three admin seats, with paywalls on RBAC and limits on collections and flows, is unsellable to clients.
Answered by Directus
“Nope. Self-hosted was not free before. That’s literally why we’re making this change, people misunderstood how things worked in the previous license+grant setup. If you’re under the threshold, it’s free, and if you’re over, it’s paid… That hasn’t changed, just been clarified. There’s no paywall on admin seats… Just limits on seat counts in general. You can use the free grant with unlimited seats and admins, or you can use the core tier with three seats/admins. We don’t limit RBAC. It simply has some advanced options unlocked on team.” On pricing: “We did as a company and I signed off on it… Our platform is not cost prohibitive. It has far more free options than other proprietary platforms and $500 a month is not as much as you think when it comes to large enterprises.”
The Open Innovation Grant terms say the grantee “is the end user of the Directus Solution and is not reselling the Directus Solution or building on top of it to provide products or services for third parties.” Doesn’t that prevent a small agency from configuring and running a Directus instance for a client, or building a SaaS on it?
Partly answered
Only the headcount half was answered: “The end users are anyone that has access to the studio as a user, so your external SaaS users, even if they’re in the database, are not included, only the system users of the Directus platform studio itself.” The direct conflict between clause (iii) and agency/SaaS use was never addressed, despite two community members asking.
What is in each Directus tier?
What the free Core tier includes, what sits above it, and which features are genuinely gated versus which were only assumed to be.
Which features are actually being paywalled?
Answered by Directus
The enterprise-only gates named were SCIM, Offline Mode, Annual Invoicing and Paid Support: “We’re not hiding the fact that we feel that big enterprises should be paying for this project, so that individuals, hobbyists, and small orgs can keep using it for free.” In the final structure, the free Core tier is missing SSO, custom RBAC filters, custom LLMs, paid support and longer revision history, and has low seat/collection limits — but “the Open Innovation Grant” has no limits or feature gates at all.
What is the difference between the “free tier” and “the full software for free”, and when does each apply?
Answered by Directus
Two separate things. The Open Innovation Grant is the full software, free, with no limits or feature gates, for individuals and orgs under $5M/year AND under 50 employees — registration and basic telemetry required. The Core tier is a separate free tier aimed at larger businesses evaluating and developing: no registration required, but low seat/collection limits and restricted features (no SSO, no custom RBAC filters, no custom LLMs, no paid support, shorter revision history). Above the grant thresholds you either stay on Core, or pay for Teams (“hundreds per month”) or Enterprise.
Why not monetize the obvious opportunities first — a paid extension marketplace, and Directus AI plans — instead of narrowing the license?
Answered by Directus
On the marketplace: “We’ve looked into this, and based on the data we have from Enterprises, don’t feel that this would be a sustainable CORE revenue model. Yes, we want to do it (offer commercial options for extension builders) but it doesn’t move the needle in terms of company ARR.” Staff also said an open-core model of professional services plus premium extensions had been tried: “It didn’t work. We could not have hit profitability under that model.” On AI: not gated — see the AI question below.
Will the AI features / chatbot be gated behind enterprise? Why not sell a Directus AI plan (resold inference) instead?
Answered by Directus
The AI assistant/chatbot is not gated — “We aren’t trying to gate this behind enterprise… the value of AI is huge, especially for individuals and smaller orgs.” Only *custom LLMs* are missing on the free Core tier. On reselling inference: “Yeah! This is something we’re looking into. It’d be great to offer AI/chat out of the box (without adding your own key), but that can be tricky and we want to support you using your preferred service.”
Can you commit that core features will never move behind enterprise licensing in future versions, and that existing self-hosted capabilities won’t be reclassified?
Not answered
$600/month to lift arbitrary restrictions on collections and flows makes sense for Cloud, but for self-hosted? Strapi starts at $45/month — does Directus realise how that compares?
Partly answered
Addressed only in the license thread, and only in general terms: staff said the limits are not arbitrary but scale-based, that the grant has no limits at all for those under the thresholds, that “Anyone is welcome to use Drupal or WordPress or any other free software. We are not competing for the same users as them; our goal is more complex data-first use cases,” and that “$500 a month is not as much as you think when it comes to large enterprises.” The direct Strapi price comparison was not engaged.
Registration keys, environments and enforcement
How v12 licensing behaves in practice: how many keys you need across development, staging and production, what happens offline, and what happens when a licence lapses. This is where most of the unanswered questions are.
Why was a custom license (MSCL) necessary rather than iterating on the existing BSL, and what guarantees exist that the Innovation Grant terms won’t narrow further in future revisions?
Partly answered
Staff listed the reasons. Why BSL did not work: it relies on an honor system that does not hold up at scale; it makes license key enforcement legally removable; it blocks monetization of development use; it introduces ambiguity around “production” and “non-production”. Why FCL did not work: it requires MIT conversion after 2 years, and it blocks making the software available to others in a commercial product/service. Why MSCL: keep the source available; allow license key enforcement that legally cannot be removed; avoid dev/prod ambiguity; allow non-competitive forks to be used/resold; remove ambiguity about who needs a license and when; convert to OSS after 4 years, to GPLv3 rather than MIT. Rijk added that “the BSL has a flexible additional usage grant meaning that every usage of the BSL license is different from the next … Us using a BSL w/ additional usage grant over a FCL derived license makes no meaningful practical difference for legal reasons.” On future narrowing, no guarantee was given — only “Let me talk with some folks on our side to see if there are any options to make this more predictable long-term.”
Why was a license change needed exactly? Are the core contributors/employees not happy? Is the core team/company struggling financially?
Answered by Directus
“Our team is happy and we are not financially struggling. But the same way we optimize the code to be efficient, we are restructuring our license to be more clear (based on feedback that it is not).” Staff used a shop analogy: update the price tags (license clarity) and install an RFID checker at the door (registration keys) — “If no one is stealing, then nothing changes.”
The enforcement code sends project id, public URL, database client, user/role/flow/dashboard/extension/collection/item/share/file counts, fields per collection, database size, file storage size, MCP config, collaborative editing and websocket status, visual editor URLs and per-method API request counts. Is it disingenuous to call that “basic telemetry”?
Answered by Directus
“Yes, that is basic telemetry. Nothing disingenuous about that, in my opinion. The majority of these are counts/sizes, which is very standard data. We need to know what features are being used (or not used) so we know where to focus our efforts.” Staff added that users who do not want to share it have options: “there’s a limited free tier with no registration, paid tiers with offline mode, or other software that can be used.”
Does the Open Innovation Grant expire? How often must it be renewed, and what is the renewal process?
Answered by Directus
“Yup… I believe it requires re-registering each year to self-attest you are still under the threshold.” A grantee in the v12 thread confirmed the practice: “I have applied to a grant and have successfully received and activated my license key. It expires in one year and I will have to renew every year.”
Every installation validates its license against a remote service every 6 hours by default. For self-hosted software on the user’s own infrastructure, why is that frequency necessary, and what happens to a deployment that loses connectivity for 24 hours or a week?
Not answered
The licensing server can change an individual installation’s entitlements between validation cycles. Under what circumstances would Monospace selectively change limits for individual customers, and will users be notified when their entitlements change remotely?
Not answered
If the JWKS endpoint rotates its signing key, older Directus instances will fail token verification once their cached JWKS expires — effectively letting Monospace force version upgrades. Is there a planned key rotation policy?
Not answered
When a paid license lapses the install locks immediately and non-admin users are kicked out. Why an immediate lock rather than a softer window where existing users keep read-only access?
Not answered
The grace-period popup links to a URL containing the acronym KYC (Know Your Customer). Is that how Directus internally describes the registration system, and how does it apply to “basic registration”?
Not answered
Will Directus remain fully usable without external connectivity? Is there a guaranteed offline mode with no runtime dependency on external services, and what happens when validation cannot be performed?
Partly answered
Only partly addressed. Offline mode exists but is an Enterprise-tier entitlement; there was no answer in the thread on runtime behaviour when validation fails on other tiers, and staff deferred the technical enforcement questions to a later release or a separate thread.
Will the license checker be a blocker in restricted or sanctioned networks? We’re in Iran, where even the Directus marketplace does not load properly.
Answered by Directus
“I’m sorry to hear that providing basic telemetry or registration confirmation might be tricky in your location, but unfortunately we can’t work around international sanctions and every possible use case.” Staff noted the org in question is well within the grant thresholds and would otherwise get the full platform free.
Which specific commercial scenarios do the new terms target, will there be a clear grace period and migration timeline, and has dual licensing (the Qt/Elasticsearch approach) been considered?
Not answered
We run three Directus instances — production, development, and a local one on a Mac for extension development. Will we need a different license key for each?
Not answered
The license model says nothing about different environments (development, acceptance, production). How does that work?
Not answered
I applied for the Innovation Grant license by emailing licensing@directus.io and also via the website form, but have had no response from either. What’s the status of grant applications?
Not answered
A common workflow is dumping a production or staging database and restoring it locally. What happens to the instance count when I restore a dump and boot Directus? What if the local environment has a different PUBLIC_URL, or sometimes has a license key loaded and sometimes doesn’t? And how does restoring a production backup onto the same environment behave?
Not answered
The grant key expires after a year and renewal depends on eligibility. What happens if my grant is rejected in the future, or if the grant requirements or feature availability change? I’d have to migrate everything CMS-related.
Not answered
What does Directus v12 send back?
Every registered instance validates against a remote service on a schedule and reports usage data with it. Here is what is in that report, and what can be turned off.
Is there a data retention policy for the telemetry? Who has access, will it be stored on Monospace-controlled infrastructure, will it be used for sales targeting or pricing optimization, shared with investors or third parties, and documented in a privacy policy or DPA?
Partly answered
Only the last part was addressed: “Of course we have all the DPA, Data Retention, and Privacy Policies… they will come out with the rest of this release.” The specific questions on access, storage location, sales use and third-party sharing were not answered in the thread.
The updated T&Cs suggest opting out of telemetry and analytics won’t be allowed under the new license. What data is being sent, and how often? No personal data may leave Switzerland for us, so background phone-home is not an option.
Not answered
Is Directus still open source?
Short answer: no, and it has not been since 2023. The MSCL replaces the BSL, and the difference between “open source” and “source available” matters if your organisation has a policy about it.
Isn’t a custom, unreviewed license a red flag compared to a known, reviewed license like BSL 1.1?
Answered by Directus
“But that’s how all licenses start, including BSL or GPL. It doesn’t make it better or worse, just new. We based it on FCL so users/companies have a known starting point to understand from.” Staff also said the license was drafted with outside help: “I worked on our licenses directly with Bruce Perens (the co-founder of open source and the OSI) as well as several SME software license attorneys,” and “Nothing is a standard… until it is.”
Will you publish the actual MSCL text before asking for feedback? It’s hard to evaluate a structure without seeing the language.
Answered by Directus
Staff posted a Diffchecker comparison of FCL → MSCL in the thread, and later agreed the whole rollout should have led with more: “I’ve posted a FCL/MSCL diff now, but I agree that a full view of the license and the tiers would have been better. We’ll adjust for this in our main release of info.”
How does Payload avoid all these complications? They are MIT-licensed with no small-org tiers and charge for enterprise only.
Answered by Directus
“I certainly don’t know what’s happening at Payload behind closed doors, but I can confidently say that them being acquired by Figma essentially means they don’t have to worry about runway, financing, or profitability. It also means they have far less overhead, because under a larger corp’s umbrella, they don’t need to pay for the HR, finance, legal, operations side of things… Figma could run Payload at a loss indefinitely and not worry about fundraising, so it’s not really a model we can follow.”
Why Directus changed the license
The community pressed hard on motive: who benefits, what happens when investors want a return, and why the change arrived without an RFC. Directus answered some of this directly.
Won’t the VC investors behind Directus eventually demand their money back and force worse decisions?
Answered by Directus
“Our investors aren’t building the software and they don’t make decisions for the company… We’ve already grown the company a LOT since their investments, so they already have their financial returns. Importantly, they can not 'ask for their money back'… UNLESS we fail in general as a business (run out of money). That’s exactly why we’re making these changes.” Staff added the investors were “the FIRST to question my decision to move from GPL to BSL 3 years ago,” and “I have made sure we’re protected from these risks (or any enshitification) as long as I’m CEO and on the board.”
How much money is Directus making, how much does it need, and how much does it want?
Answered by Directus
Ballpark figures given: roughly 50 team members’ salaries, plus hardware/software, plus “6-figures / month in infra” — “~$10M+ / year of expenses, just to sustain.” On the goal: “How much money do we want? Enough to keep Directus existing as a modern data platform without selling out. That’s it.” On profitability: “We’re at a great place in terms of our team and expenses, so we don’t need a lot more internal growth. But we do need to generate more revenue than expenses (profitability), and until that happens, we are beholden to investors (not a good thing) and could risk running out of runway/cash.”
Shouldn’t paying Cloud customers already cover infra and salaries? If not, is something wrong with the model?
Answered by Directus
“In short, cloud revenue does not magically cover our team/infra costs. We have 50 people and a VERY big AWS bill. We’re doing awesome, but are still growing towards profitability.” Staff outlined the arc: OSS project with $0 revenue → VC funding with big expenses → grow revenue before runway ends → profitability, and said Directus is “almost at step 4.”
Why wasn’t a community RFC published for such consequential architecture before it reached draft-PR stage? The enforcement PRs and grace-period code date back months.
Partly answered
“Correct… this is a BIG update, and we’ve been planning and building it for a while… I feel I’ve been upfront about that. My goal with these posts was not to ask if we can make this change, but to gut-check things before going live. We’ve made some big adjustments based on feedback, and I’d say we’re in a pretty good place now.”
Is the redesigned v12 Studio the Rust rebuild we’ve been hearing about?
Answered by Directus
“The Directus v12 Studio redesign is not related to the RUST rebuild. That project is a separate product called Monospace that is currently in preview. Directus continues to be built on TypeScript (Node.js) and Vue. The Directus v12 redesign is a structural update to the Studio’s core layout: the module bar, navigation, header, and sidebar… The update provides a visual foundation for the new draft and publishing workflows included in v12 as well as other content editing workflow improvements that are slated for later releases.”
15 questions Directus has not answered
These were asked in the official threads and have had no staff reply. Most concern enforcement mechanics — per-environment keys, validation cadence, offline behaviour, telemetry retention. We would like answers to these too, and will update this page when they arrive.
- The Open Innovation Grant agreement says the grant “expire[s] annually and [is] subject to periodic eligibility reviews” and that the grantee “agrees to provide information reasonably requested by Directus to confirm eligibility.” What does an eligibility review actually consist of? What falls under “information reasonably requested”? Can a review occur outside the yearly renewal? And how exactly is false or inaccurate eligibility information assessed?
- For a small non-profit (a German “eingetragener Verein”) with ~700 registered members, ~50 active volunteers, 6 board members, one half-time paid secretary and ~€50,000 annual revenue — do all registered members count toward headcount? Only active volunteers? Only board members? And how does “headcount” translate to other countries?
- Can you commit that core features will never move behind enterprise licensing in future versions, and that existing self-hosted capabilities won’t be reclassified?
- Every installation validates its license against a remote service every 6 hours by default. For self-hosted software on the user’s own infrastructure, why is that frequency necessary, and what happens to a deployment that loses connectivity for 24 hours or a week?
- The licensing server can change an individual installation’s entitlements between validation cycles. Under what circumstances would Monospace selectively change limits for individual customers, and will users be notified when their entitlements change remotely?
- If the JWKS endpoint rotates its signing key, older Directus instances will fail token verification once their cached JWKS expires — effectively letting Monospace force version upgrades. Is there a planned key rotation policy?
- When a paid license lapses the install locks immediately and non-admin users are kicked out. Why an immediate lock rather than a softer window where existing users keep read-only access?
- The grace-period popup links to a URL containing the acronym KYC (Know Your Customer). Is that how Directus internally describes the registration system, and how does it apply to “basic registration”?
- Which specific commercial scenarios do the new terms target, will there be a clear grace period and migration timeline, and has dual licensing (the Qt/Elasticsearch approach) been considered?
- We run three Directus instances — production, development, and a local one on a Mac for extension development. Will we need a different license key for each?
- The license model says nothing about different environments (development, acceptance, production). How does that work?
- I applied for the Innovation Grant license by emailing licensing@directus.io and also via the website form, but have had no response from either. What’s the status of grant applications?
- A common workflow is dumping a production or staging database and restoring it locally. What happens to the instance count when I restore a dump and boot Directus? What if the local environment has a different PUBLIC_URL, or sometimes has a license key loaded and sometimes doesn’t? And how does restoring a production backup onto the same environment behave?
- The grant key expires after a year and renewal depends on eligibility. What happens if my grant is rejected in the future, or if the grant requirements or feature availability change? I’d have to migrate everything CMS-related.
- The updated T&Cs suggest opting out of telemetry and analytics won’t be allowed under the new license. What data is being sent, and how often? No personal data may leave Switzerland for us, so background phone-home is not an option.
Where this comes from
Both official threads, read through the Discourse API rather than scraped, on 1 August 2026. Nothing here is a summary of a summary.
- Directus License Revision: Community Feedback Requested — ben (Ben Haynes, Directus CEO — staff), 102 posts
- Everything v12 | Upgrades, New Features, and MSCL License — emmapaaj (Emma Paajanen — staff), 14 posts
This is a plain-language summary of what Directus said in public, not legal advice. Licence terms change — they changed once while the first thread was still running — so check the official licence and grant agreement before making a commercial decision, and tell us if you spot something out of date.
Running Directus, or deciding whether to?
We build business systems on Directus and publish open-source extensions for it. If the licensing picture affects a decision you are making, we are happy to talk it through — no pitch.