TLDR is that the cloud version hasn't been our primary focus yet and we put a high pricing on purpose that is not the final pricing, while we figure out the good pricing strategy. As of today everything is free without any limitation, we don't enforce any limit. And when we rollout the real pricing, it will be more compelling
I stand very much corrected and wasn’t trying to make an allegation…
Your pricing page says pretty much the opposite and is quite confusing — it literally just shows “Free” vs. “Grow” and no option for self hosting made clear
Thanks for that eye-opener. I read the comment and just believed it, would have closed the tab with no further interest if you hadn't been on the ball and replied within minutes, in time for it to be there when I opened this comments page.
I've noticed previously in life that if I don't correct an allegation, people will just assume the to-me-obvious-falsehood is true by my silent assent. I didn't know that I, too, fall for this stuff despite being aware of the problem.
Hi, I'm Charles and leading the engineering work on Twenty!
We've made the bet to invest on a tailored design for our components. Using an existing UI library is a strength to use robust components and move faster, but I've always struggled to customize it.
There is always a point where you want something custom that is not supported by the library and you start hacking into it.
On previous projects, I've almost always used existing UI libraries.
For Twenty, this is a long term project and the initial burden of creating UI components vs customizing existing ones will be marginal on the long run.
IMO, if you have strong design requirement (and you have enough resources ofc), don't go with UI librairies ; I take as much inspiration as I can from them, I may fork one but I would not hack their API
Agree, it feels like the right decision as well. The grid felt a little bit like shadcn hence I asked.
Using external libraries gives some early velocity, but most of the good looking libraries are incomplete and most of the complete ones are boring (material / bootstrap)
We want our design to match exactly Figma. Shadcn could have been an option because their approach is to have users copy/paste the code, so it could have worked. But copying styles from Figma isn't much more work, it wasn't painful
Since VSCode is the most popular editor, it sets a pre-configured environment for people who want to contribute. For exemple it suggests extensions we recommend using.
Odoo is an open source ERP so they're doing a lot more than CRM. They also want to replace Docusign, Shopify, Workday, Notion, Intercom, Google Sheets, and more.
We will focus on a narrower scope and try to do it very well instead of going into that many directions
Tbh we haven't been focused on monetization at all. We've just put a high number to avoid disappointing people afterwards by raising pricing (I hate when company advertise something as cheap, then lock you in and raise prices). But we don't enforce any pricing as of today, you can use the cloud version for free without any limitation.
The actual pricing will likely be significantly lower.
Initially we thought of introducing a pricing system that's more aligned with the value created (with a generous credit system, based on number of actions taken), because we found that Salesforce charges by seat but in large orgs most of the seat companies pay for are unused, so the incentives aren't aligned.
I'm not sure we'll go this way because people also want a simple and predictable pricing they can understand.
Contacts are a core feature. You can not expect to succeed as an open-source company by limiting the number of contacts at any point of maturity. Provide a decent number of features, and then charge for SSO and stuff like that.
Or put everything free and have your own dedicated service, with your infra and support. Look at Sentry. Everything is open source. They are making a lot of money. Not everybody wants to run Sentry on their own infra. Same with CRM.
Be careful, that’s going to confuse a lot your buyers, especially at large corporations. Unless you are focusing in very tiny shops where who decides is the main or only user, your customers will be more concerned with cost predictability than with fairness. They just want to know what the cost will be with no surprises as to earmark the budget without having to revisit it later.
I don't get some of the negative comments.
We run an open source project with a very long backlog and I came across Gitstart as I was looking for ways to accelerate development. We started working with them recently and overall I'm very happy with the service. At first the quality of PRs wasn't great, but it is still better than the average open source contribution, and it's improving everyday as they gain knowledge of our codebase and expectations.
As a remote team that is just starting a new project, it would have been hard for us to onboard and train a junior developer today. Using Gitstart fills a gap for tasks that we can easily delegate, typically something that's already done in a similar way in the code base. That way our team can focus on more challenging problems.
- Backend: offer extensibility that is powerful while secure in our multi-tenant cloud service.
- Frontend: ensure that custom plugins don't feel limiting while not disrupting the unified design, as the overall software appearance, not just the core, shapes the end-users' brand perception/experience
As for frontend - you could build reusable components and make possible to use them/build upon them. Microsoft made FluentUI to make consistent and usable components across product line. However each product customizes styling slightly and builds their own components that are not opened up... which is pity.
If you ever plan having different things, better keep them in mind at the beginning - bolting them in afterwards may be cumbersome.
As for the cloud version, I replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37808121
TLDR is that the cloud version hasn't been our primary focus yet and we put a high pricing on purpose that is not the final pricing, while we figure out the good pricing strategy. As of today everything is free without any limitation, we don't enforce any limit. And when we rollout the real pricing, it will be more compelling