Paid subscriptions for Wakapi.dev

[muety]

Hi all 👋! At the time of writing this, I'm sitting on the train on my way home for Christmas. So happy holidays to everyone who is celebrating! 🎄

Recently, we did a survey where we asked our users if they would be willing to pay for kind of a "premium" plan for the hosted service at Wakapi.dev. The results showed that 82 % of all participants are open for it. So, let me announce today that Wakapi.dev will have paid subscriptions soon.

Background

Let me provide some background on this.

First of all, Wakapi itself is free, open-source software and will always be! You will always be able to self-host your own Wakapi instance at no cost and also our "official" service at Wakapi.dev will be free to use by default.

The plain reason, why we decided to add payments to Wakapi.dev is simply to cover the costs that come with running the service. Today, more than 1,100 people use Wakapi.dev - a fact that I'm super proud of (I dreamed of my own little SaaS project for long)! Database size has grown beyond 10 GB and, depending on the time of day, Wakapi.dev gets between 0.5 and 10 reqs / second. Currently, Wakapi is still hosted on a small, cheap virtual private sever (VPS) alongside a couple of other projects and is still doing fine. But as data volume keeps growing, I expect Wakapi's current infrastructure to reach its limits soon. We will probably have to move to more powerful server infrastructure and replace the single-node MySQL database by a cluster.

How it works

The idea for Wakapi's paid subscription is this: by default, every user's data will only be stored for one year. That is, in the future, you'll only be able to look back at 12 months of coding history. This will keep the per-user amount of storage required more or less constant over time. For anyone, who wants to go beyond this, we now offer the option to unlock unlimited data storage for 4 € per month, billed monthly.

Let me clarify, that this will be the only available subscription. There won't be any complicated pricing models, such as discount when opting for yearly payments, or tiered pricing, etc. Also, no features will get locked behind a paywall. The paid plan only applies to the length of coding history available.

Also, if you don't want to opt for the paid plan, but still keep all your data, Wakapi offers the option to easily transfer all your coding activity from Wakapi.dev to your self-hosted instance.

That's it!

If you want to support Wakapi, opt for a paid subscription. Your support is highly appreciated! But definitely feel free to just keep using it for free or hosting your own instance.

Thanks to all of you! 🙏

[muety]

📫 Here's our recent announcement mail regarding subscriptions, for anyone who doesn't have an e-mail address set in their Wakapi.dev account: https://wakapi.dev/files/announcement.html

[muety]

Quick update: due to an inconsistency in how browsers interpret the CSP 'form-action' header, you couldn't subscribe using Chrome, lately. It's fixed now!

[muety]

To clarify: the recommended way of getting your data out of Wakapi is to transfer it to your own, self-hosted instance with the import functionality (Settings -> Integrations -> WakaTime). Alternatively, you can use a script to get a raw dump of all your heartbeats, as mentioned in #453 (comment).