TL;DR: Seq 1.4 is out, and with it we’re fine tuning the licensing options.
Building a software product is a continual exercise in listening, learning and adapting. Since releasing v1.0 of Seq nearly five months ago, we’ve watched keenly as customers put it to work and to be frank, we now have a much better understanding of how Seq fits in to the tooling landscape.
Part of this learning has shown us how customers fit Seq into their own environments, including how those environments dictate licensing requirements. Feedback has highlighted some discrepancies between how we license Seq and how it’s used, so for the past month we’ve been working on a revision to our model.
First, two important things:
- If you’re using Seq today, you don’t need to change anything – the license you use Seq under is unchanged unless you upgrade to a newer version (outside of the one-year included upgrades period)
- If you’re worse off under the new model, or have questions/suggestions please email support@getseq.net – we will help you across
Changes to our free tier
The challenge with licensing is to make a fair cost/benefit proposal: Seq should be less expensive to use when the benefit is less and when the effort in supporting it is less. When the benefit is greater, or when the support requirements are greater, asking more helps us to provide the level of service required.
Unfortunately, the unlimited-usage “Developer Edition” we launched with thwarts this requirement – how much Seq costs to use ended up coming down to whether the production environment was fully-secured or not. In a production environment secured by other means (e.g. a VPN or other network-level security) the price to use Seq might be zero (via the “Developer Edition”), while a small difference in network topology might require the top-level “Enterprise Edition” for the exact same use of Seq – that is, the exact same benefit.
To fix this, we’ve bitten the bullet and decided to license Seq purely on a per-user basis. The old Developer Edition has been replaced with a new, fully-securable Single-User license. Many, if not most, customers using the old Developer Edition will be able to switch to the new Single-User license and take advantage of authentication and SSL to put Seq in more places.
Register to receive your single-user license key
No model is perfect, but we think setting the price on the basis of the number of users is a much better measure of both how much value Seq will provide, and how much support/development we will need to sustain to make the best experience possible. Basing this on whether or not authentication is required was a mistake on our part.
Some teams will be using the old Developer Edition with more than one user, so won’t be able to take advantage of the new Single-User license. If you’re in this position, and can’t switch to one of our subscriptions or per-user tiers, get in touch – supporting you is important to us and we’ll help you across so that you can continue to benefit from new Seq releases.
New per-user tiers
Previously we supplied Seq in five, fifteen and twenty-five user tiers. There turns out to be a big difference between a six-user team and a fourteen-user one, so the new model is more fine-grained, providing five-user increments from 5 all the way to 25 users.
Three server installations with all tiers
Perhaps more importantly, Seq previously included a single server installation with each of the five- and fifteen-user tiers. It turns out that this penalised users with segregated environments: if “Dev” and “Test” are on-premises, but “Prod” in the cloud, requiring two licenses seems fairly arbitrary – where an environment is situated shouldn’t make such a big impact on pricing.
In the new model, each tier includes three Seq servers. This means a single license should cover most teams regardless of how their environments are organised.
New unlimited-user Enterprise license
In Enterprise environments, counting seats can be annoying and lead to more time spent in the purchasing process as teams change size and shift focus. For Enterprise customers we’re now offering an unlimited-user license, installable on up to ten servers, to make life simpler.
We’re also looking at ways to make an Enterprise SLA available alongside this option – please get in touch via sales@getseq.net if this is needed in your organization.
Subscription pricing
Along with our up-front pricing, we’re now offering Seq on a pay-as-you go basis for those who’d rather pay by the month. We’re making this available primarily as a convenience – the product you get is exactly the same, i.e. you will still host Seq on your own servers.
Subscriptions come with full email support and access to all upgrades during the subscription period.
We’re counting on your feedback
We count on your feedback to make Seq a better product and to make it accessible no matter your needs; if you have suggestions, queries or concerns we’d love it if you can email us.