Here is our licensing system:

  • A perpetual license that allows you to use TablePlus with no limitations forever.
  • A year’s worth of updates. After one year from the date of purchase, you can either renew the license to continue updating or keep using the then-current build forever without any limitations. It’s backward compatible.
  • A license entitles you to use TablePlus on one computer only. If you have multiple devices, or people using TablePlus, you can either purchase a team license at a discount or add more seats to an existing license key.

Let’s break it down bit by bit.

1. A great product needs a viable business

That means, other than a passion for building a great product, we also need enough money to:

  • Pay for the infrastructure to keep things alive.
  • Pay for the development. The app doesn’t code itself, at least for now and the foreseeable future.
  • Pay our bills while sitting there supporting our users all day long.
  • And pay for dozens of untitled fees.

Then licensing is a must.

To make it free while being maintained and developed, one might choose to make it open source. But we already made our point about why not going open-source in this post. In short, unless the product is huge and backed by the tech giants, most open-source products are:

  • Unintuitive
  • Lack of resources to fund the development, thus the speed of development is slow.
  • No one is mainly responsible for it when things go wrong.

That’s a part of the reasons why we keep TablePlus as a commercial product. To make it accessible for everyone, we have a free version of TablePlus that:

  • anyone can download and use it for free, forever. There’s no trial time limit.
  • every functionality is included.
  • is limited by usage: if you need more than 2 opening tabs/workspaces/ advanced filters, you will need a license. Otherwise, it’s good to go.

Basically, we are leaving an option for everyone to use the app with the very standard usage level. By doing that, only those who love to support the development and think it deserves the support, and those with higher needs than most users, are the ones who actually buy a license. More often than most, this group of users uses TablePlus for work related projects and uses it frequently. TablePlus is a tool you use it to make $, it’s not a huge amount and the ROI is much higher when you can earn your investment back in a few hours. Then we think it’s fair to buy a license.

2. Everybody gets a fair share of updates

First, our development cycle is very frequent and never seems to stop.

Each update contains various bug fixes and new improvements that we put a lot of time and effort into, and one year of updates means a lot of changes. If you think you need the new update, then you should update. But if you are happy with where it is now, you can feel free to skip the update and keep using it happily ever after.

Second, because we think it’s fair for our users.

We first saw this model from Sketch since their 4.0 version update and we really think it’s brilliant. Here is how they explained it in their blog post:

“Until now, it has been our custom to release a major version of Sketch (2.0, 3.0, etc) every couple of years as a paid upgrade, with minor updates (3.1, 3.2, etc) for free in between. While this is a very common model for software, we don’t think it is fair: customers who have purchased an app closer to the original release date get free updates for longer than someone who bought the same product halfway through its release cycle. We think a fairer approach is for everybody to get the same period of free updates, no matter when they purchased the app.”

That’s right, we believe paid update should not be based on a silly version number. It’s fair for everybody to get the same period of free updates, no matter when they purchased the app. So with TablePlus, you have one year of free updates from the day you purchase it. Since we do not have a major upgrade, every update counts.

To be clear, it’s not a subscription model where you are locked in with the recurring payment and it stops working as soon as you cancel the subscription. You can continue using TablePlus with no limitations when the license expires.

3. It’s affordable

For most of our users, they don’t need more than one device.

We learned this while releasing a pricing structure from the very early days with a two-device based license at a higher price as the default option. We got a blast of negative feedback. People don’t want to pay more for an extra device that they never use, so we changed it. We lowered the price and keep it one-device based by default. It’s more affordable, everyone is happy, and we are good to go.

Even if you have multiple devices, chances are, two is the common number and you can buy a combo two-device based license at an already discounted price.

The future

With the current pricing model, the revenue stream is more predictable therefore we will be more confident and proactive in hiring new engineers, pushing for faster development and better customer support.

For us, customer support is a crucial part, and when we say it’s important, we mean it. We try to be as responsive as possible. No matter which time of the day or how trivial or complicated the issue is, as long as we see it, we immediately act on it. We never classify one as paid support vs free support or whatsoever. Every support request is being treated the same and is always free. If it’s critical, or very quick to implement, it’ll be up first, else, it can wait.

Everything is just the beginning, we have a long list of pending features to be added to TablePlus such as ERD, database compare, visualization, etc. And of course, there’s still room for improvement for the current features. So stay tuned!

Download TablePlus for Mac.

Download TablePlus for Windows.

On Linux? Download TablePlus for Linux

Need a quick edit on the go? Download TablePlus for iOS