I went with perpetual licenses for SE version instead of subscriptions. Probably against all advice
I’m building TaskView, a self-hosted project management tool with an open-source core, web app, and mobile apps.
I work on it alone in my spare time. So far, it has around 600 signups, a few active teams, and zero revenue.
This month, I finally published a pricing page and went against almost every piece of SaaS advice I’ve read:
No subscription. Customers buy a license once and keep it.
My reasons, roughly in order of importance:
1. Self-hosted users dislike recurring per-seat pricing
2. The license is perpetual, but updates are version-based
A license covers one major version. Buy TaskView 1.x once, and you receive all 1.x updates and new features. When 2.0 is released someday, upgrading will be optional and sold separately. Customers who do not upgrade can continue using their existing version indefinitely. This boundary is important. Offering lifetime updates for a single payment would eventually become unsustainable.
3. I’m optimizing for fewer, higher-value customers
I’m a solo developer with limited support capacity. For me, 20 customers paying $1,000–$2,000 once may be more sustainable than 200 customers paying $10 per month. Every additional customer creates onboarding, support, and maintenance work, regardless of how little they pay.
Current pricing is flat per organization:
$990 for up to 20 users
$2,490 for up to 50 users
$4,990 for unlimited users
The first 10 licenses are discounted by approximately 30%.
I’m giving the experiment 60 days. If I do not get at least a few purchases or serious sales conversations after roughly 500 pricing-page visits, I’ll reconsider the model instead of waiting indefinitely and hoping it works.
Has anyone here successfully sold perpetual licenses for self-hosted software?
I’m especially interested in what happened after the first year or two:
Did customers pay for major-version upgrades?
How frequently did you release paid upgrades?
Did you eventually add maintenance or support subscriptions?
What would you do differently?
Site: taskview.tech
GitHub: https://github.com/Gimanh/taskview-community
