Heya! Appreciate you taking the time to write this up, and thanks for the Concrete CMS context! Hadn’t come across them in my previous licensing research. I’m familiar with that Reddit thread, both Ben and myself have been actively responding there 
On the Concrete CMS model specifically: the key difference is that they’re effectively a SaaS-first product with a free self-hosted option. That gives them the infrastructure revenue and direct usage visibility to fund the open core. We’re self-hosted first, which changes the math significantly. We’ve previously tried leaning harder into cloud as the primary revenue driver a few years back, and it pulled focus away from the core product in ways that hurt everyone: issues piled up, PRs stalled, community questions went unanswered. We also learned that cheap cloud tiers don’t really work for us: our product focusses on self-hosted for compliance and data sovereignty. A cloud-only funding model simply doesn’t serve them, and doesn’t fund us.
That brings us to licensing. We’ve learned a lot in the coming-up-on 3 years (the original post on that topic is a fascinating read as well!) we’ve been running with the current BSL setup, both good and bad. A few things I can share on where our heads are at:
The $5M revenue threshold in the BSL doesn’t work. Not so much philosophically (we still believe small teams should be able to use Directus freely) but practically. Revenue isn’t observable, self-reporting doesn’t scale, and it creates a dynamic where compliance is optional and invisible. The shift we’re working toward isn’t a “charge everyone more”, it’s a “make the relationship explicit”.
Headcount is a better signal than revenue, but will still require some “talk to sales” ambiguity in a public model. The cleanest answer we’ve found so far is feature capping with generous limits: clear lines, no guessing. That would indeed allow small teams to adopt confidently, and charges to exist when they hit enterprise usage scale. We’re still working through the specifics on this and expect to share more soon