AutoMapper and MediatR Licensing Update

In my last post, I shared the news that I've decided to take a commercialization route for AutoMapper and MediatR to ensure their long-term success. While that post was heavy on the motivation, it was intentionally light on the details. I did share that I wanted to be transparent on that process, and this post is part of that transparency.

There is a TON of information out there on possible models for sustainable open source, such as:

• Consulting services
• Open core
• Hosted services
• Dual license
• a dozen others

Of course besides my previous situation, "be fortunate enough to work at a place that values and directly sponsors your work." This is the easiest place to be, but for projects that reach some threshold of users/downloads/complexity, maintainers must rely on sponsorship in some form or fashion. And when that sponsorship goes away for whatever reason, well, here we are.

Of the many options available, the most viable option is to move AutoMapper and MediatR to a dual license model. This looks to be the best choice after carefully examining the options and consulting with many other OSS maintainers who have already made this journey.

Dual Licensing Model

When I first started thinking about how I might go about this, I asked myself, "who bears the most responsibility in ensuring the sustainability of the OSS projects on which they depend?" which is a long winded way of saying "who should pay?" But another way of thinking of this is "who should NOT pay?" Looking at how others do this as well as how I want to approach it, I want to make these libraries free for:

• Developers using it in an OSS setting
• Individuals/students/hobbyists (using AutoMapper for fun not profit)
• Non-profit/charities (maybe not for fun but also not for profit)
• Startups or small companies (below some revenue/funding threshold)
• Non-commercial setting (this I'm not sure is absolutely necessary with the other categories)
• Non-production environments (instead of any trial period etc.)

I don't know if this exact verbiage is what will be the end result, but this is my overall goal.

Then for who I'm targeting for paid for-licenses, it's for-profit businesses using these libraries for commercial activities. Looking at my clients over the years who've used my libraries, it's a mix of these free/commercial categories.

In terms of a model for commercial licensing, I want to ensure that paid licenses add value beyond "I can download the license." This is the more fun part of this exercise for me, where I can try the things I never really could before without a more direct form of sponsorship/funding. I have a lot of ideas here, but nothing ready to share yet. If you have an idea of "if my company paid for a license, what else would I want to have included?" I would love to hear about it!

I am looking at a tiered license model but no per-seat licenses. I don't want to charge individual developers anything—that seems like a pain for everyone involved and I'm trying to keep things simple. "A new developer gets onboarded and now we need a new license" is too much for me to deal with and goes against the spirit of these libraries—the benefit is to the entire team, regardless of the number of developers.

I don't know what those tiers will be exactly, I'm figuring that out next. I do expect some blanket enterprise, site-wide licenses that hopefully makes everything simpler for everyone. I've been on the other side of the table, getting licenses approved internally with clients, and I understand predictability and simplicity go a long way.

Thoughts on Pricing

As for pricing, I don't have details yet, and probably won't until launch in the next couple months. Range-wise, it's hard to compare to other commercial or dual-licensed products out there, since I don't want to do any individual or per-seat license and that seems to be the norm. I am however keenly aware of how much tooling and library products cost as I have to pay for many of these myself.

But if I were to compare to the cost for a team of 10 or 50 or 100 for their IDEs, I would expect my commercial license price to be a fraction of that.

Thanks again to everyone that's reached out with kind words and support, and to the community for their patience while I figure things out.