OK, so let me first start by saying that I hope we all agree that we need transparent and trustworthy pricing setups in our lives.
Speaking of glass-doors, this is our C-level team, I’m the one with the glasses
Regardless of the level of control you need over your lives and businesses, everyone deserves stable and predictable pricing. Whether you consider them to be fair or not might be another question, of course, I’m just addressing here the very basics of a social contract between producers and consumers.
Since Penpot is an Open Source company, we are not shying away from any of these discussions.
Please, let me go through the present and future of our pricing.
Penpot’s pricing today
As of today, you can use Penpot for free as an open-source product under the MPL 2.0 licence.
A screen capture of the Professional tier, which shows how amazing an open-source product can be
However, our SaaS offer includes some nice perks if you upgrade from the powerful and generous free Professional tier to the Unlimited tier for just $7/editor/month. You can already join the wait-list and get 2 months free when we roll this out during 2025 Q2.
Even if you don’t need those extra perks you might want to consider upgrading as a way to support Penpot. You’ll be happy to know that the Unlimited tier has a capped monthly bill of just $175/month regardless of the number of editors. This is great news for everyone but specially for those teams and organisations that want to onboard more than 25 editors (an industry standard way of identifying power users).
Check what’s included in the Unlimited tier for SaaS.
Note: this Unlimited tier doesn’t make much sense for a self-hosted Penpot, since we wouldn’t be incurring in the associated costs. If you are self-hosting Penpot yourself, you can somewhat see Professional and Unlimited tiers blended together. Profit!
What about an Enterprise tier?
Some organisations (typically medium or large) require a more direct relationship with a vendor. They could start with a simple self-serve Unlimited tier but they know they’ll eventually require a more serious relationship (a special contract, support SLAs, security measures, data access, etc).
For those cases we have a simple €950/month flat-fee offer that works irrespective of our SaaS/self-host setup and your organisation’s size (except notable gigantic exceptions). You can enjoy the same Penpot experience whether you’re using our SaaS or self-hosting Penpot yourself, therefore one single Enterprise tier works like a charm.
Check what’s included in the Enterprise tier for Self-Host & SaaS.
Note: in the meantime, we’re building a separate control backoffice that stays detached from the Penpot product but is able to determine how users in a particular organization should experience it. This will greatly enhance our Enterprise tier offer without the need or wish to create two separate Penpot products. The best Penpot experience will always be Open Source.
On a more personal note
We just covered the basics of our pricing. It’s simple, proportionate, transparent (like our roadmap) and predictable. It addresses both SaaS and self-host options for a deployment-agnostic tool like Penpot. It underscores our commitment to building the best design and prototyping tool for designers and developers. And it’s Open Source.
The vast majority of us think enough is enough. It’s time we confront old-fashioned proprietary tools owning our work and seeing us merely as squeezable puppets.
Tools like Penpot belong to a new open ecosystem that’s building a different and brighter future.
I think we need to stop feeling OK-ish of how creative we can be maxing-out the inherent limitations and restrictions of the current tooling status-quo and start feeling proud of how creative we can be.
