The world is changing. There is a quiet revolution going on right under our noses. It has been building for years and is now beginning to surge. I am talking about the movement to break free from the closed-source, fee-based license model and embrace open-source sponsorships. Increasingly, companies are seeing that Open-Source software is important to business and, in many cases, forms critical infrastructure. The most notable example of that is the Linux Operating System in all its various distributions that run the vast majority of the Internet, which we all rely on every day for almost everything.
And yet those same companies who are willing to pay unquestioningly for commercial software licenses generally seem reluctant to pay the same or even a reduced fee for open-source software that performs in many cases better than the closed-source equivalents. There is this wildly misguided notion that if you pay a company for closed-source software, it is somehow better because you paid for it. There is a crazy presumption that closed-source software is worth paying more for because there is some special factor that costs more money because it is closed-source.
Let's just sit and think about that for a minute.
This is a mindset that says, "I don't know what goes into making this, so it must be worth paying more money for." This mindset associates Open-Source software with being more limited than commercial software simply because you are being forced to pay for something you have no right to examine or modify. This is mind-blowing when you really think about it.
The current business world runs on a myriad of Open-Source applications which are in use at enterprises of all sizes, such as Apache, MySQL, Postgres, Nagios, and Prometheus. These all typically run on open-source Linux OS and quite often in open-source Docker containers. All of this software needs to be maintained, tested, developed, and secured, and all have associated costs. If we genuinely value the infrastructure these tools provide, then we should be willing to pay qualified developers to maintain it all. If you use open-source in your environment, sponsoring the project is the best way to ensure quality code maintenance. Open-source projects rarely have any fees associated, but there are always opportunities to help fund the developers who keep the code current.
KumoMTA is one of those open-source enterprise-grade infrastructure tools. This is an MTA that meets or exceeds the needs of the largest senders in the world. We certainly could have created it as a commercially licensed product but chose to give our customers access to the code through the open-source model. This is not just a side hustle to keep us busy in the evenings; it is a real business with real people who have committed their full-time work to making it the best MTA software in the world. We have similar costs and concerns without the financial pressure of paying back VC loans, but our other expenses are almost the same as any of our commercially-licensed competitors.
One big difference is in our support of the open-source community, which we feel very strongly about. A common misconception is that closed-source, fee-based MTAs are built using completely custom code, so it is, therefore, worth paying more for. This could not be further from the truth. One popular commercial MTA seems like an extensively custom-written solution but when installing it, users actually ended up with over two hundred Open-Source RPMs as part of the installation, all glued together by a relatively small RPM of the actual commercial proprietary source code. You don't have to believe me, though. Just do a search in your MTA for openssl or gnutls and you will probably find that open-source software being used to encrypt message traffic. Likewise, you will find many open-source packages in use in those "closed-source" offerings like postgresql, nginx, python and perl. You have been paying to use open-source software for years.
Unlike our closed-source competitors, all our people are in engineering, professional services, and support. We don't and won't have any full-time Sales, Marketing, Administrative, or any other role that doesn't contribute to customer outcomes. What we can't do with that team is outsourced so that our spending is focused on what benefits our users, not our investors.
We minimize our marketing and sales costs and redirect those expenses to research and security review. We eliminated the need to repay financing entirely by going to a user sponsorship model. Every penny our users give us goes back into product development, community support, and paying our people.
The result of that focus has been some of the best documentation in the industry, multiple tutorials, and some fantastic user-focused webinars. But all of this comes at a cost that is roughly the same as any of those fee-based, closed-source competitors. As with any open-source project, the money to run the business comes from Supporters and Users.
If you are considering building your own MTA, or have built one already, you will likely find it more cost-effective in the long run to move to KumoMTA and free up your internal developer resources for better things than maintaining infrastructure without the worry that your internal MTA will stagnate as it stops being a focus for your engineering team.
If you believe in what we are doing but are not ready to switch yet, you can still support us now to make sure we are ready when you are. Switch to a support model after you make the move.
If you are a current user but not on a support plan, consider adding a sponsorship package that fits your budget.
KumoMTA will never lock you into a fee-based, closed-source model. We rely on our users and supporters in the same way closed-source vendors rely on your forced payments. The only real difference is that we don't hold your business hostage.
Contact us, and let's talk about how you can adopt the last MTA you'll ever need.