Pricing for Data Sync
Fair Pricing
Our priority is on Creating Value 💚 We offer the ObjectBox database for free and have poured all our resources (our hearts, soul, time, and money) into it. We feel it provides a lot of value for free to a lot of developers – that makes us happy and proud, yes, but it really is not sustainable for us as the people building it. So, while our priority is on Creating Value, which might be priceless 😊, we need to find a sustainable model to continue providing value for developers.
Bottom line: We do price fairly – and expect to get paid fairly. So, the following is our approach…
How We Price
We created ObjectBox Sync for those users who want to take advantage of a highly efficient out-of-the-box solution, going to market faster, de-risking go-to-market, lowering resource use and maintenance cost. We believe Data Sync saves time and resources and therefore is a great and highy sustainable way to support the developer community. In short: We love it and think it provides great value, but… while it is awesome and saves time, money, and headaches, there is no necessity to use it. So, you have no drawbacks whatsoever using the ObjectBox database without Data Sync. That’s why we believe it is a great and fair pick for monetizing some of the value we provide. Using the paid Data Sync helps us fund all of the ObjectBox development.
Open Source and pricing
We are proud to offer the ObjectBox Database to the public at no cost. Any developer can take advantage of the database’s ease of use, powerful capabilities, and lightning fast speed. We decided early on not to deprive users of any fundamental capabilities. This will not change, never ever!
So, we now must answer the challenging question of how to create a sustainable company based on forever free and partly open source software….
Adaptive pricing model
Our users and customers come from a wide variety of use cases… from persisting and synchronizing data in cars to simple mobile consumer apps to fully fledged on-site IoT applications – it can be anything….
Because ObjectBox is such a fundamental solution and we are still a small company, that holds its challenges and our ambition to price fairly is reflected in our pricing strategy.
We price on a per project basis
(the license is always tied to a project)
We accommodate the use case based on the usage
(users / devices / sync instances) in tiers that are specifically designed for each customer
We price based on the business model
e.g. if you are doing a hobby project or are a small startup, you will not need to pay anything unless you scale
We price based on support needs
Note: we only offer support to paying customers, but most of our customers don’t need support
We price based on additional needs you have
e.g. developer days, trainings, specific legal requirements
Please note: Our pricing is always based on our license to be found at: https://github.com/objectbox/cla. If you need to negotiate a different license this will be costly due to the time and legal fees involved and we would only start such a process, if you are willing to pay for it.
If you have a specific business model that you believe cannot be reflected well with the above, reach out to us – and we’ll see what we can do.
