Around two years ago they changed their license.
I used to be a big champion, and used it at a Healthcare organization I was the CTO of.
After the license change, I moved on to other solutions. Not because of the cost, but because I couldn't justify the risk of building systems on top of a non-open platform. I've seen too many vendor relationships sour over the years.
Also, IIRC, the 5 million threshold isn't just for revenue, it includes funding (or at least it used to, not sure if it still does).
Node Red is really interesting is you need more of a workflow style thing.
Honestly though, I've mostly just fallen back to good 'ole express. With a well architected set of middleware, you can have declarative auth and all the bells and whistles directus offers, but at 100x the performance and trivial debugging.
It used to be a bit more work, but with Claude these days, spitting out high quality restful routes is a matter of minutes...
Same, it was a real shame to see it change in this way.
I'm also not impressed with how they've gone about doing it; no transparency on pricing for the self-hosted solution, you have to be subjected to a sales call to even get a quote. They're clear that they use "total finances" for trying to determine how much to charge you, which has its own issues with some business models.
The money also seems to be going towards lots of activities that have very little to do with actually .. building the core of the CMS. This whilst there's still fairly fundamental missing validation logic, even in the now-paid SaaS product [1]. How much of the now-$500 a month plan for 10 users goes towards the "Directus TV" (with content such as "Live scenes from our team with ambient music to help you get into the flow when you're coding") nonsense?
It was enough to put me off.
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They really did it. FSaaS (Flow State as a Service)
Sign me up
From https://directus.io.