Licensing strategy

oli6

Hi everyone,

I recently tested grommunio (only scratching on the surface 🙂) and I really like it. From a technical and conceptual point of view it’s a great piece of software, and I would genuinely love to use it.

However, I’m running into a problem with the licensing model. I run a very small private mail server (no company, no profit) with around 9–10 mailboxes for myself, family, and friends. I don’t charge anyone for this, and it doesn’t generate any income at all. Unfortunately, the current licensing only allows up to 5 users for free, which makes it effectively impossible for use cases like mine.

I fully understand and respect that grommunio needs to generate revenue and that commercial users should pay for the product. That is absolutely fair. The pricing also makes sense for companies that actually earn money with their IT infrastructure. But for private users or non-profit setups, the jump from “free” to “paid” feels very steep — especially when you’re still talking about a tiny server with fewer than 10 mailboxes.

This also affects non-profit organizations, clubs, or community projects. These are often exactly the kinds of users who want to move away from Microsoft solutions for philosophical or financial reasons — but the current licensing makes that difficult. At the same time, licensing costs starting to scale significantly at higher mailbox counts (e.g. 50+) are totally understandable for real businesses.

Maybe a licensing model that also takes profit / revenue into account could be worth considering? For example:

a higher free tier for private or non-profit use

or a very low-cost “home / community” license

or a self-declared non-commercial tier

Small private users may not bring immediate revenue, but they often bring visibility, feedback, documentation, community support — and sometimes they are developers themselves who might contribute back or recommend grommunio in professional environments later on.

Right now, the decision for small private servers is basically binary: either don’t use grommunio at all, or pay for mailboxes that don’t generate any money. And for many of us, that unfortunately means not using grommunio — even though we would really like to.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for building such a promising product.

WalterH

oli6 This also affects non-profit organizations,

For non-profit organizations, there is a special discount available.
Grommunio is in many cases cheaper than some competitors.

oli6

WalterH thanks for the clarification — I wasn’t aware that there is a specific discount for non-profit organizations. I must have missed the 25% discount information.

WalterH Grommunio is in many cases cheaper than some competitors.

That may be true in certain scenarios. However, for non-profit organizations Microsoft services are more or less free up to 300 users. I’m not trying to argue about which solution is better or cheaper in general — my point is rather that the current licensing model might be worth reconsidering.

A small example: IntelliJ Ultimate (and the other JetBrains tools) are free if you don’t earn money with them and register them for an open-source project. This helps adoption a lot. Some people are currently unemployed (for health reasons or others), some run minimalistic private servers to avoid selling their data to Google, and others — like me — operate very small mail servers for family and friends. These are all valid use cases, but grommunio currently misses them.

A big reason why platforms like Raspberry Pi became so successful is their community — the “small” users. In my opinion, grommunio should not miss that opportunity either.

WalterH

oli6 That may be true in certain scenarios. However, for non-profit organizations Microsoft services are more or less free up to 300 users.

Not in Austria.

umgfoin

oli6 for non-profit organizations Microsoft services are more or less free

Apart from the fact that even a free licence is of limited use if the US government can, without significant hurdle, demand the licensor to sanction your non-profit organisation as soon as the organisation's activities do not meet with the approval of the US president.

oli6

@WalterH should be the same EU-wide: https://www.microsoft.com/de-ch/microsoft-365/business/nonprofit-plans-and-pricing?market=ch

umgfoin I don’t want to steer this discussion into geopolitical or US-government topics. My point is purely about licensing principles and real-world use cases.

I’m neither a Microsoft user nor a grommunio customer at the moment — precisely because of licensing. If I had the choice between Microsoft and grommunio, I would obviously prefer grommunio, but that’s not what this discussion is about.

The point I’m trying to make is that there are many legitimate non-commercial use cases (private servers for family/friends, small non-profits, community projects, hobby setups) that currently aren’t covered well by the licensing model at all. That’s the issue I wanted to highlight.

WalterH

oli6 should be the same EU-wide

All Cloud based services, not on prem as grommunio.