XPipe has been out now for a few months and during that time I received a lot of feedback and a small community formed. This helped me to get a lot of insight into the users, use cases, and requirements, and I was able to constantly improve XPipe.
Going full-time
The demand for XPipe so far also convinced that there is a market to develop XPipe full-time and finance it by providing commercial and enterprise plans for interested customers. So I decided to go for it! This will improve the development speed and quality as I can now fully focus creating the best possible application.
I think a lot of software users have been scarred by such announcements of projects going commercial as that usually results in features being paywalled and changing licenses. I can assure you though that this is not the case with XPipe. The scope is fairly small and only involves me, so no investors or other employees. This drastically lowers the break-even value compared to other products and allows me to implement a more lenient commercialization.
What does this mean for me?
Essentially, you can use all current features without any limitation for free, unless you use it for commercial purposes, which now requires a professional license upgrade. Furthermore, most upcoming features will also be included in the free version. The only exception are features purposefully made for team collaboration and tools only used in enterprises. For now, the only professional-exclusive feature is the newly added git repository storage, which allows you to share your XPipe configurations with others via your own git remote repositories. The open source model and license also won't change. Some professional-exclusive features will probably not be included in the repository though.
So if you intend to use XPipe in commercial contexts, I would like you to ask to buy a professional license for that. You can of course also do that if you want to support the project without any commercial intentions.
Outlook
I hope that everything works out and that I can make this endeavor work. That way I can continuously keep improving XPipe! There are a lot of cool new features already in the pipeline that will be released relatively soon.
