I’m the co-founder of BigBlueButton, an open source virtual classroom we’ve been building since 2007.
About three years ago, we integrated tldraw into BigBlueButton as our whiteboard. It’s been an excellent upgrade over our old, simple whiteboard — tldraw is a fantastic project.
I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks, the commercial company behind BigBlueButton. We have growing by the traditional open source business model: we offer hosting, engineering services for acceleration of features, and support contracts.
I understand the motive behind tldraw's change of license. Open source projects often get asked two contradictory questions:
1. Can I use your work for free?
2. Can you guarantee that you’ll be around in 5 years?
You can’t answer (1) without a solid plan for (2). Licensing changes are one way projects try to answer both of these questions.
We are no stranger to license changes, we recently rewrote the entire back-end of BigBlueButton and moved away from mongoDB to PostgreSQL + Hasura.
For us, moving to tldraw 4.0 would mean:
- As Blindside (the company): buying a commercial license — that’s straightforward as we are also a commercial company.
- As BigBlueButton (the open source project): it would require every organization running BigBlueButton to obtain its own license key to tldraw.
There are pros and cons here. We want a world-class whiteboard in tldraw based on a sustainable open source project, but we also want to keep BigBlueButton’s community deployment model simple.
Curious how others in the HN community have handled integrating source-available components into open source projects. How do you balance sustainability with accessibility?
limagnolia · 32m ago
Answering those two questions depends a bit on the "you" in the question. If "you" refers to the open source project/code, then both can be answered with a resounding "yes". If on the other hand "you" refers to you individually or as a company, then the first can be answered with a resounding "no" and the second a solid "maybe, that depends on how much you are willing to pay us for a 5 year support contract" (though you should probably word it a bit differently when talking with potential clients).
As far as working with source available components, suggestion one is to look for others int he community that you can cooperate with to maintain a fork, and option two, if you really can't get the community to support a fork, is to make it a plugin/optional component, preferably with an API so that other solutions can be integrated as options, or at least a fallback to the old version that was open source.
all2 · 33m ago
> We have growing by the traditional open source business model:
I know this is not relevant to the thread, but could I pick your brain on this model? I'm looking at launching a product soon and I've been struggling with how I might monetize it in a sane manner that works for customers and for the business.
Zaheer · 39m ago
I was hopping between a few canvas tools recently. Primarily tldraw & excalidraw for some quick spec work. Was surprised to see that both don't have better support or even apps for iPad. Feels like a missed opportunity given how many people on iPad would want to use this sort of tool. I know the website still works but it's just a bit clunkier. Another feature request: shape detection.
steveruizok · 18m ago
We support iPad about as good as we can, with stylus pressure and some tricks to avoid slowdowns due to the high input rate. I actually did the ink in Excalidraw too, so it at least worked last time I touched it! But the difference between iPad Safari input latency and native latency is gigantic, really heart breaking to work on. Not sure if a native wrapper would improve things. If I did a native app, it would likely be a minimal drawing app for handwriting only. I recently started prototyping an Android app with the new low-latency jetpack ink APIs and they’re fantastic, beating perceived latency vs iPad even on a 60fps screen (Daylight).
Imustaskforhelp · 2h ago
Why is tldraw getting more and more centralized/requiring a special license...
I like tldraw as a software but I used to see tldraw having multiple pages in the same canvas and that had helped me tremendously in the past which It seems is now a sign up feature...
I hope excalidraw can catch up too. The more options and the more truly foss options, the better...
striking · 1h ago
> Our 4.0 release includes a new license with changes to where tldraw can be used. Fate and capital both demand that tldraw be a sustainable project, so these changes are designed to help us commercialize the SDK without cutting off community adoption.
nextworddev · 1h ago
They realized the market is small so they are raising prices
alabhyajindal · 1h ago
Sharing a link is also a sign up feature now. Didn't tldraw come up after Excalidraw was already quite popular? Seems like a missed opportunity for the latter since tldraw came up after and was able to figure out a business angle for a similar (same?) software.
steveruizok · 48m ago
Sorry for the logins around collaboration. I really liked the open collaboration feature too but we were getting some sketchy user behavior around it and my nerve broke. You can still join someone else’s board anonymously though. When you share a link to a board with a friend, they don’t need an account to join the board.
Excalidraw was already really established when I started tldraw, yeah. I was a contributor (the app uses my ink library perfect-freehand!) and still love the project. Excalidraw has done really well with their SaaS app Excalidraw+. I still think the bigger long term need / opportunity is for an SDK product, given that whiteboarding is becoming more of a commodity feature, like kanban boards or maps.
nickdandakis · 56m ago
Here to say that I have been working on a canvas-based app for a while now. Canvas apps are hard y'all!
I greatly appreciate tldraw and think the licensing changes are completely reasonable. The team is highly responsive on Discord, and looking forward to the company nailing down the nuances of pricing out this specific business model.
Pricing is difficult as it is, open source pricing double so, open source canvas library pricing has got to be one helluva hard problem to solve.
I would like to see more improvements to the sync portion, specifically more granular authorization controls.
steveruizok · 43m ago
Thanks! Granular permissions are a common feature request, especially in education, so there’s a good chance we work on that this quarter.
pumanoir · 33m ago
If we want to stay in the older license?
Do we just do `npm i tldraw@3` and work from there?
steveruizok · 24m ago
You can stay on 3.x. The license on 3.x shows a watermark and a license key will hide it. New commercial licenses will still work for 3.x too, in case you’re unable to upgrade, though 4.x has only a few small breaking changes.
beeman · 56m ago
The $500/m plan seems pretty excessive. I expect an alternative to pop up soon and hope such greed won't capture those devs.
Glad I only just started using tldraw weeks ago, time to move away.
ricardobeat · 1h ago
I wonder what the imagined path to production for small projects is meant to be.
- for hobby projects: at what moment do you go from hobby to commercial license (and need $6k in cash)?
- for new businesses: you now either have a 90-day window to find product-market fit, or assume you'll have to burn $6k in the event of failure?
steveruizok · 14m ago
I think we’ll do extended trials for small teams if they’re pre-revenue / pre-funding, and I can imagine setting up some relationships like that with incubators etc. A few other posters have asked the same question and it’s a good one, thanks.
beeman · 54m ago
They aim at AI companies who currently are well funded and can easily carve out $500/m for an SDK.
No comments yet
tracker1 · 1h ago
Wow, that is a pretty hefty license fee...
florians · 1h ago
Peanuts if you build a business on top of the SDK.
ricardobeat · 1h ago
When you have one already. How do you start building a business though?
steveruizok · 1h ago
Yeah, this is the current gap in the offering. Pricing is such whackamole. I expect we’ll offer extended free trials to teams that need longer to get off the ground.
pan69 · 48m ago
It might take years to get a business of the ground.
lubitelpospat · 1h ago
Great project!
If I may ask - how do you guys compare with React Flow?
BTW - licensing looks fair, hope the effort that has been put into this project pays off!
steveruizok · 1h ago
Hey, thanks! React Flow is more narrowly focused on flow charts and workflows. It’s also MIT licensed and much more popular (looking at NPM installs) and sells premium access to docs and examples, while we license the library directly. Our canvas is more broadly capable, with a default feature set closer to Excalidraw, except that we use React / DOM for the entire canvas, like React Flow does. We also have a very different way of managing the canvas data, closer to a game engine than a controlled React component. I should write some blog posts.
Two of the starter kits we released today are more flowcharty. It’s been possible to make this kind of thing with tldraw for about 18 months, since we made our bindings API, and a few teams have built graph UIs on tldraw already, but I wouldn’t say it’s an easy path. Hopefully these starter kits will make it easier to uh start.
colesantiago · 1h ago
That is a massive license fee here.
IMO A 100-day trial is too short to try it.
I would more likely to use tldraw if it had a monthly fee even at $100-$300/mo.
But $6K a year and getting only community support is a huge risk for some SMEs.
steveruizok · 33m ago
Small teams are so hard to price for. When we first launched we had a non-commercial license and I was spending forever negotiating these tiny deals with teams where that was already a huge expense. The watermark solution we brought on last year fixed that problem but then anchored our price low for bigger companies. I’m sure half this forum has been through this. It’s so hard!
I expect we’ll do extended trial licenses for teams that are serious but just getting started, or are pre-revenue pre-funding; and there’s a hobby license for non-commercial projects. Pricing… never ends.
About three years ago, we integrated tldraw into BigBlueButton as our whiteboard. It’s been an excellent upgrade over our old, simple whiteboard — tldraw is a fantastic project.
I'm also the CEO of Blindside Networks, the commercial company behind BigBlueButton. We have growing by the traditional open source business model: we offer hosting, engineering services for acceleration of features, and support contracts.
I understand the motive behind tldraw's change of license. Open source projects often get asked two contradictory questions: 1. Can I use your work for free? 2. Can you guarantee that you’ll be around in 5 years?
You can’t answer (1) without a solid plan for (2). Licensing changes are one way projects try to answer both of these questions.
We are no stranger to license changes, we recently rewrote the entire back-end of BigBlueButton and moved away from mongoDB to PostgreSQL + Hasura.
For us, moving to tldraw 4.0 would mean:
- As Blindside (the company): buying a commercial license — that’s straightforward as we are also a commercial company. - As BigBlueButton (the open source project): it would require every organization running BigBlueButton to obtain its own license key to tldraw.
There are pros and cons here. We want a world-class whiteboard in tldraw based on a sustainable open source project, but we also want to keep BigBlueButton’s community deployment model simple.
Curious how others in the HN community have handled integrating source-available components into open source projects. How do you balance sustainability with accessibility?
As far as working with source available components, suggestion one is to look for others int he community that you can cooperate with to maintain a fork, and option two, if you really can't get the community to support a fork, is to make it a plugin/optional component, preferably with an API so that other solutions can be integrated as options, or at least a fallback to the old version that was open source.
I know this is not relevant to the thread, but could I pick your brain on this model? I'm looking at launching a product soon and I've been struggling with how I might monetize it in a sane manner that works for customers and for the business.
I like tldraw as a software but I used to see tldraw having multiple pages in the same canvas and that had helped me tremendously in the past which It seems is now a sign up feature...
I hope excalidraw can catch up too. The more options and the more truly foss options, the better...
Excalidraw was already really established when I started tldraw, yeah. I was a contributor (the app uses my ink library perfect-freehand!) and still love the project. Excalidraw has done really well with their SaaS app Excalidraw+. I still think the bigger long term need / opportunity is for an SDK product, given that whiteboarding is becoming more of a commodity feature, like kanban boards or maps.
I greatly appreciate tldraw and think the licensing changes are completely reasonable. The team is highly responsive on Discord, and looking forward to the company nailing down the nuances of pricing out this specific business model.
Pricing is difficult as it is, open source pricing double so, open source canvas library pricing has got to be one helluva hard problem to solve.
I would like to see more improvements to the sync portion, specifically more granular authorization controls.
Glad I only just started using tldraw weeks ago, time to move away.
- for hobby projects: at what moment do you go from hobby to commercial license (and need $6k in cash)?
- for new businesses: you now either have a 90-day window to find product-market fit, or assume you'll have to burn $6k in the event of failure?
No comments yet
Two of the starter kits we released today are more flowcharty. It’s been possible to make this kind of thing with tldraw for about 18 months, since we made our bindings API, and a few teams have built graph UIs on tldraw already, but I wouldn’t say it’s an easy path. Hopefully these starter kits will make it easier to uh start.
IMO A 100-day trial is too short to try it.
I would more likely to use tldraw if it had a monthly fee even at $100-$300/mo.
But $6K a year and getting only community support is a huge risk for some SMEs.
I expect we’ll do extended trial licenses for teams that are serious but just getting started, or are pre-revenue pre-funding; and there’s a hobby license for non-commercial projects. Pricing… never ends.