Licensing

Faktory Enterprise is commercial software -- you purchase it to get extra features and that money ensures Faktory remains supported for the foreseeable future. Faktory has the notion of environment -- you start Faktory in development, staging or production and only pay for production servers. The default environment is development, you must enable staging or production via FAKTORY_ENV=[staging|production] or -e [staging|production].

Note that you can test drive Faktory Enterprise by using the macOS binaries available with each release. You must purchase to access Linux binaries.

Pricing

Faktory Enterprise is priced according to total concurrent connections with the base price allowing 100 connections, typically enough to perform millions of jobs per day. The number of current connections is reported at the bottom of the Web UI home page in the "Connections" box. I don't recommend more than 1000 connections per server.

If you want to run dozens of Faktory servers or wish to use it in a high security environment, see below for an unlimited license option which does not phone home.

Development

In development, I envision a team of developers, all starting a Faktory server on their own machines to develop their applications. In development mode, Faktory Enterprise does not require any license key so you don't need to worry about distributing private keys/licenses/credentials to your engineering team. However development mode comes with notable restrictions to prevent people from abusing this trust. When Faktory Enterprise is started in development (the default):

• The Redis Gateway feature is disabled -- it doesn't make sense to enable real-time replication for a local development server
• Cron stops after ~60 minutes.
• Queue Throttling stops after ~60 minutes.

Staging

In staging, Faktory Enterprise will run 24/7 but is limited to 100 connections. If you want to load test with your maximum licensed connections, you must use production.

Production

In production:

• The server will not boot unless a valid license is found in FAKTORY_LICENSE or /etc/faktory/license.
• The connection count is limited to the amount purchased.
• The server phones home daily to verify subscription status. If the server cannot contact the license server after one hour or the license is expired, the commercial features may stop working. Please whitelist https traffic to *.contribsys.com if you have a draconian firewall.

Sharing

You are welcome to share a single license between multiple Faktory Enterprise instances. You can set FAKTORY_CONN_MAX=N and the instance will limit itself to N connections. By setting FAKTORY_CONN_MAX=50, 2 servers can safely share a 100 connection license.

Unlimited License

The unlimited license option allows your organization to run as many Faktory Enterprise servers with as many connections as you wish. The server does not require network access to the license server but the license expires after one year. The server will log warnings daily, starting one month before expiration. It will display a warning banner in the Web UI after expiration. If still running one month after expiration, the server will disable some commercial features. Contact support@contribsys.com to purchase.

Suggestions to improve these policies are always welcome; I want to achieve a fair balance between ease of use and ensuring active users continue their subscriptions.