docusealco
Proposal: No paywall for self‑hosted core; paywall only for DocuSeal‑hosted services
Thanks for DocuSeal. Today, essential features are paywalled even when self‑hosting and using our own infrastructure (per the pricing page: Teams/Tenants and Roles, API/Webhooks, company email address, and basic branding). This makes the free self‑hosted version impractical and undermines the autonomy expected from an open‑source deployment.
Proposal: if we run DocuSeal on our own servers and services (DB/storage/SMTP/queues), all core features needed for a complete multi‑user workflow should be unlocked with no per‑user fee. Paid tiers should focus on DocuSeal‑hosted value—managed cloud, email delivery through DocuSeal’s infra, compute/storage, SLA support, SSO/advanced auditing, higher limits, and specialized verifications. We are not asking to make the hosted service free; only that the OSS self‑hosted core not be restricted.
Impact and next steps: this change would broaden global adoption and contributions while keeping a clear business path for hosted offerings. Could maintainers confirm which “core” features still depend on DocuSeal infrastructure and outline a path to decouple them for self‑hosted? Happy to help define core vs. enterprise and test a self‑hosted profile. Community: please +1 and share your use cases.
Just my 2 cents as another user. We (a non profit organization based in Germany) are currently consuming the free version, self hosted in our environment. While I do agree with you that certain features could be considered "core", I'm struggling to see how this makes self-hosting "impractical" and how that "undermines the autonomy expected from an open‑source deployment".
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have SSO, I'd love to have the ability to use some of the one-shot submission and/or template creation features based on HTML using the API which are currently behind the "paywall" as you call it. That said, we do have the ability to create templates in the web UI using PDF files, create submissions and send them out for signature, involve multiple parties, have the ability to include a lot of different field types, and much more. All that for free - I do consider that as core and would argue that this is already quite generous.
Allow me to look at this from another direction - someone (DocuSeal LLC in this case) developed a software. Instead of requiring us to pay small fortunes to use it, they offer the ability to self-host (which you can't take for granted), and publish a lot of the feature for free on top. The only thing I'd argue is the big banner on the center of the web page stating
Free forever for individuals, extensible for businesses and developers. #1 Open Source Alternative to DocuSign, PandaDoc and more.
That may be bending the truth a bit, but I'm still grateful for what I do have. In fact, we're now considering buying a few licenses (even though we're self hosting!) to get the feature and support continuous development of the software.
Chiming in – I like how straightforward DocuSeal is compared to other OSS options (OpenSign, etc.). But the on‑prem license fees feel hard to justify – there’s no price break for running it on your own infrastructure.
