FAQ

Thanks for all your feedback and best wishes!

Starting a company is hard, and pricing your products is even harder. We read every single piece of feedback and make some slight adjustments to our license, tiers, included clients and discounts we can give.

Please keep in mind, that at this point we are also a startup and try to find good solutions that are sustainable for all of us. Please don’t hesitate to contact us so we can continue fine tuning our company.

We wrote hundreds of emails in the last days, and here are the answers to the most common questions we had.

Why did you make the move from free open source to a dual license?

You can read the long version here: https://leastprivilege.com/2020/10/01/the-future-of-identityserver/

But in short, we were looking for a sustainability model for our open source project. We explored a couple of options like sponsorship and add-ons, but it ultimately didn’t work for us. The consistent feedback from our customers was that they would prefer to buy a license.

This allows us to spend our time improving the product and the ecosystem around it like support and documentation.

Will Duende IdentityServer stay open source?

Yes. The code-base will stay open source and all development will be in the open. You can find it here on Github.

Is there still a free version of Duende IdentityServer?

Yes. We offer Duende IdentityServer for free to non-commercial open source under the RPL license. Also, we don’t require a license for any non-production work (e.g. hobbyists, dev/test environments etc.)

Where’s your license agreement?

You can find it here.

What’s a client?

In OAuth a client is an application that requests tokens from IdentityServer. If you have a web front-end, a mobile application and batch-job needing either end-user authentication or API access, this would be 3 clients. If you are unsure, contact us and so we can have a look at your architecture.

Which tier is the best for me?

It depends how many clients you have, and which features you need. Starter Edition starts with 1500 USD and includes 5 clients and support for unlimited APIs. Every additional client adds 300 USD. This is suitable for smaller environments and startups.

Business Edition adds support for automatic management of signing keys (creation, rotation and secure storage) and includes 15 clients. Again, every additional client adds 300 USD.

Enterprise Edition has no restrictions on clients and also adds multi-issuer/multi-tenant support. This is ideal for larger environments and SaaS companies.

Are there discounts for startups?

Yes. If your company has been in business for less than 5 years, we can offer a 50% discount for 3 years. If you have other ideas, how we can help you to bootstrap your startup, please contact us.

What if I am not a startup, but a small business and cannot afford a license?

Please contact us so we can assess the situation, and hopefully find a solution.

Are there discounts for non-profits and charities?

Yes. We offer a 50% discount to registered non-profits. Registered charities can get a free license.

How does ISV licensing work?

If you are hosting the software for your customers in your own datacenter/cloud you can get the Enterprise Edition and host as many instances of IdentityServer as you like.

If you re-distribute IdentityServer (e.g. selling it to a customer / on-premise installation), please contact us so we can have a look at your particular setup.

Are there multi-year licenses?

Yes. We offer multi-year licenses. We also offer discounts in that case.

Do you offer perpetual licenses?

We don’t believe in perpetual licenses. Modern software needs constant updates. This might be for extra features, bug fixes, security updates, or because the underlying platform (.NET Core in our case) gets updated.

When will Duende IdentityServer be released?

We will start publishing preview versions end of October 2020. Version 5 will be released in January 2021.