Free
The server, the admin panel, the CLI and every official plugin we ship. There is no paid edition, no licence key, and no plan above this one.
What that means
We do not sell hosting
voidbase runs in your own Cloudflare account from the first deploy. We do not host it and we do not resell anyone's infrastructure, so there is nothing sitting between you and the machines for us to mark up. That includes voidbase cloud: it signs in to your Cloudflare account and creates the instance there. The thing it makes is yours, and we could not put it on a bill if we wanted to.
We do not sell the software
It is MIT licensed and published on npm, and the version we run is the version you run. Nothing is held back for a tier, because there is no tier. If that ever changes it will be because we added something new, never because we took something away.
You might still get a bill, and it will not be ours
Cloudflare's, if you outgrow their free tier. A project with no users costs nothing there; a project with users pays for the users. We have priced that against every other backend we could get real rates for, with a calculator on each page, because "it depends" is not an answer. Start with Supabase or Firebase if you are coming from one of those.
Then how does this pay for itself?
Honestly, this is the part most open projects are vague about, so here is the plan in the order we expect it to matter.
- Sponsors. This is the main one. We would rather be paid by people who want the ecosystem to exist than take a cut of everyone inside it. Support voidbase is what that looks like, including the part where it is not open yet.
- Official plugins and themes, free. As many as we can write. An ecosystem does not start behind a paywall, and a backend with nothing to install is a backend you have to finish yourself.
- A subscription, later, for the specialised ones. A growing basket of official plugins and themes that most projects will never need. Specialised, not essential, and never something that was free yesterday.
- A marketplace where other people earn. If you write a plugin or a theme worth paying for, you should be able to charge for it. That is the point of building the marketplace rather than a plugin directory.
All of that is a plan and none of it is built. It is written down properly on the roadmap, with what each piece actually involves.
What we will not do
- Charge per seat, per project or per instance.
- Keep a feature out of the open version so a paid one has something to sell.
- Make leaving expensive. Your data exports as SQLite and files and the API is PocketBase's, so the thing you would move to already exists and already runs your code.
- Put anything behind a subscription that was free before it.
Fix it yourself. The link below opens this file in GitHub's editor and forks the repository for you if you need one, and your change becomes a pull request without leaving the browser.