Recently, I wrote an article about Tiny’s open core (OC) business model. I encourage you to read it for more information about our relationship with open source. Essentially, in the OC model, our core platform is open source, and add-ons and support (“the crust”) are premium only. And to better cater to this relationship, we have recently reviewed how we package our premium plugins to open up more opportunities for new and existing users of TinyMCE.
As we have built-up a larger library of plugins to TinyMCE, it has become more difficult to learn the value of each of them in a simple way. To help address this, we have taken all of our premium features and separated them into three categories. We believe that these address increasing levels of sophistication in the use case of TinyMCE, and thus a correlation with value and price.
The four tiers are:
- Community
- Essentials
- Professional
- Enterprise/Custom
Community
Our free tier is based on the open source core of TinyMCE. It contains all of the basic plugins.
If you use Tiny Cloud, it also comes with global CDN access and the usage of Tiny Drive.
Essentials
Premium, productivity-oriented features that have been developed and built specifically to enhance the efficiency of content creators come with the Essentials plan. This plan specifically includes our most popular premium plugin PowerPaste as well as tools such as Advanced Code Editor, Advanced Media Embed, and Checklist.
You can access PowerPaste and 8 other popular productivity features via Tiny Cloud from just $25 a month. They are also available in self-hosted form from our sales team.
Professional
The best way to think about these features are those that ensure content writers maintain compliance, be it with the company brand, legal compliance or accessibility compliance. These come with our Professional plan.
Historically, this plan would cost more than $150 per month, but under the new packaging will cost only $75 per month. The compliance plan also comes with everything in the productivity plan, so you can access a total of 12 different premium features, meaning each premium feature costs less than $10 per month.
Enterprise/Custom
Our final new packaging concept is around the needs of larger teams. This is about unlocking an entire new set of collaborative editing features such as AtMentions, Comments and real-time collaboration (coming soon).
Due to the added complexities involved in configuring these features, you’ll need to contact our sales team so we can ensure you have the appropriate level of technical support to get it implemented in your product. The same goes for self-hosting of our premium features.
Our pricing page breaks out each of the packages, and the following diagram helps to visualize the various tiers.
The impact of this change
Most projects use the open source version of TinyMCE, and you won’t be affected at all by these changes. You will continue to have the same access to the features you’ve always had with no changes.
Where there have been changes made, is in how we look at our premium features.
I’d encourage you to check out the recent post, for more in depth information about these changes.
Commercializing an open source project isn’t easy, especially when it’s important to ensure you maintain the open source status of your work. As part of the software community, we all have a responsibility to support open source creators as they continue to develop leading technologies through shared values of passion, excellence, and open collaboration.
