Hi @tea-artist
,
First off, thanks so much for your attention and thoughtful reply. I’d really appreciate it if you could genuinely consider what our colleague mentioned earlier — there’s already a precedent for instance-based pricing models. Right now, tools like Baserow and NocoDB are widely adopted, especially in setups like N8N.

In practice, the use of these platforms — or even the free version of TEABLE — is likely to continue. So positioning TEABLE as the more expensive alternative might end up limiting its long-term growth.

I truly believe that adopting a self-hosted, per-instance pricing model could be a game-changer. It would also help drive the development of official N8N nodes and other integrations. TEABLE stands out with its impressive performance and UX compared to the rest. And considering we already have BYOK and the infrastructure in place, it doesn’t seem unfeasible at all — in fact, it wouldn’t generate any apparent costs, only revenue. Right now, we’re using the free version and still getting fewer features than other solutions.

When offering a cloud service, its price has to cover development cost as well as all hosting cost (storage, compute, networking, maintenance). When a customer chooses to selfhost the software, all of the cost from the latter category are carried by the customer already. They only owe you (the developer) a payment for the past and future development time. Therefor, it is completely off-the-rails to ask for the same price for a selfhosted environment as in the cloud environment. It also makes no sense to employ per-seat licensing, as the amount of seats in the selfhosted environment makes zero difference to your own cost or workload.

Imagine a small company with fixed 18 people, but frequent on- and offboardings due to on-demand freelancer hirings and short-term employees. Due to the frequent change in users, they require the user admin panel, which is locked behind the subcription. And since the amount of seats on a selfhosted license cannot be changed after the fact, this small company would have to estimate their highest possible employee count at any future point in time, lets assume a max of 25 people, and then pay ludicrous $ 6.000 per year - TO DELETE USER ACCOUNTS!

In no universe would this company license Teable to get access to a feature this simple. And even if they did, Teable would not provide this company a boost in efficiency so large that this fee would be remotely reasonable. They would easily spend $ 600 a year on an unlimited (seats, data, no support) instance license, but with this pricing model they'll simply stay on the free plan or purchase another product. Companies like this are not rare. You're heavily limiting your own growth potential by expecting sums this large.

When offering a cloud service, its price has to cover development cost as well as all hosting cost (storage, compute, networking, maintenance). When a customer chooses to selfhost the software, all of the cost from the latter category are carried by the customer already. They only owe you (the developer) a payment for the past and future development time. Therefor, it is completely off-the-rails to ask for the same price for a selfhosted environment as in the cloud environment. It also makes no sense to employ per-seat licensing, as the amount of seats in the selfhosted environment makes zero difference to your own cost or workload.

Imagine a small company with fixed 18 people, but frequent on- and offboardings due to on-demand freelancer hirings and short-term employees. Due to the frequent change in users, they require the user admin panel, which is locked behind the subcription. And since the amount of seats on a selfhosted license cannot be changed after the fact, this small company would have to estimate their highest possible employee count at any future point in time, lets assume a max of 25 people, and then pay ludicrous $ 6.000 per year - TO DELETE USER ACCOUNTS!

In no universe would this company license Teable to get access to a feature this simple. And even if they did, Teable would not provide this company a boost in efficiency so large that this fee would be remotely reasonable. They would easily spend $ 600 a year on an unlimited (seats, data, no support) instance license, but with this pricing model they'll simply stay on the free plan or purchase another product. Companies like this are not rare. You're heavily limiting your own growth potential by expecting sums this large.

I feel the same frustration. I brought up the issue of the limitation on listing and deleting inactive users in the self-hosted version on Discord; a couple of others agreed with me, but we never received an official response. I wrote:

"I'm now just starting to test Teable as I am comparing different solutions to use personally and potentially for my team later on. It is looking pretty promising and I really like the direction the project is going, but I'm surprised about the lack of simple managing option for users, at least in the free self-hosted version. As far as I am aware, as admin, in the free self-hosted version, I can't list the users that are signed up or delete an user if inactive or if it as a malicious/unwanted signed up. It is OK to put complex administration under a paid plan but I feel at least those two elements I mentioned should be still in the category of basic admin."