Why Proxmox offer full feature set for free

Proxmox VE has been available free of charge to download and run for a long time, which is one of the reasons it got so popular amongst non-commercial users, most of which are more than happy to welcome this offering. After all, the company advertises itself as a provider of “powerful, enterprise-grade solutions with full access to all functionality for everyone - highly reliable and secure”. ¹

Software license

They are also well known to stand for “open source” software as their products are licensed as such since the inception. ² The source code is shared publicly, at no cost, which is a convenient way to make it available and satisfy the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) ³ conditions which they pass on to their users, but which also grants them access to the said code when they receive a copy of the program - the builds as amalgamated into Debian packages and provided via upgrades or all bundled into a convenient dedicated installer.

Proxmox do NOT charge for the program and as the users are guaranteed, amongst others, the freedom to inspect, modify and further distribute the sources (both original and modified) - it would be futile to restrict access to it, except perhaps by some basic registration requirement.

Support license

Proxmox, however, do sell support for their software. This is not uncommon with open source projects, after all funding needs to come from somewhere. The support license is provided in the form of a subscription and available at various tiers. There’s no perpetual option available for a one-off payment, likely as Proxmox like to advertise their products as a rolling release, which would deem it financially impractical. Perhaps for the sake of simplicity of marketing, Proxmox refer to their support licensing simply as “a subscription.”

“No support” license

Confusingly, the lowest tier subscription - also dubbed “Community” - offers: ⁴

• Access to Enterprise repository;
• Complete feature-set;
• Community support.

The “community support” is NOT distinctive to paid tiers, however. There’s public access to the Proxmox Community Forum, ⁵ subject to simple registration. This is where the “community support” is supposed to come from.

NEITHER is “complete feature-set” in any way exclusive to paid tiers as Proxmox do NOT restrict any features to any of their users, there’s nothing to “unlock” upon any subscription activation in terms of additional functionality.

So the only difference between “no support” license and no license for support is the repository access.

Enterprise repository

This is the actual distinction between non-paid use of Proxmox software and all paid tiers - identical in this aspect to each other. Users without any subscription do NOT have access to the same software package repositories. Upon initial - otherwise identical - install, packages are potentially upgraded to different versions for a user with and without a license. The enterprise repository comes as preset upon fresh install, so an upgrade would fail unless subscription is activated first or the repositories list is switched manually. This is viewed by some as mere marketing tactics to drive the sales of licenses - through inconvenience, but is not the case, strictly speaking.

No-subscription repository

The name of this repository clearly indicates it is available for no (recurrent) payment - something Proxmox would NOT have to provide at all. It would be perfectly in line with AGPL to simply offer fully packaged software to paid customers only and give access to the sources to only them as well. The customers would, however, be at will to redistribute them and arguably, there will be a “re-packager” on the market sooner or later that will become the free (of charge) alternative to go for when it comes to ready-made Proxmox install for the majority of non-commercial users instead. Such is the world of open source licensing and those are the pitfalls of the associated business models to navigate. What is in it for the said users is very clear - product that bears no cost, or does it?

Why at no cost?

Other than driving away potential third party “re-packager” and keeping control over the positive marketing of the product as such - which is in line with providing access to the Community Forum for free as well, there’s some other benefits for Proxmox to keep it this way.

First, there’s no difference between packages eventually available in the test and no-subscription repositories. Packages do undergo some form of internal testing before making their way into these public repositories, but a case could be made that there is something lacking in the Quality Assurance (QA) practices that Proxmox implement.

The cost is yours

The price to pay is to be the first in line to get delivered the freshly built packages - you WILL be first party encountering previously unidentified bugs. Whatever internal procedure they went through, it relies on the no-subscription users to be the system testers which are the rubber stampers on the User Acceptance Test (UAT).

In case of any new kernels, there’s no concept of test at all, whichever version you run, it is meant to provide feedback on all the possible hiccups that various hardware and configurations could pose - something that would be beyond the possibilities of any single QA department to test thoroughly, especially as Proxmox do NOT exactly have “hardware compatibility list.” ⁶

Full feature set

It now makes perfect sense why Proxmox do provide the full feature set for free - it needs to be tested and the most critical and hard to debug components, such as High Availability (prime candidate for paid-only feature), would require rigorous testing in-house, which test cases alone cannot cover, but non-paid users can.

Supported configurations

This is also the reason why it is important for Proxmox to emphasize and reiterate their mantra of “unsupported” configurations throughout the documentation and also on their own Community Forum - when they are being discussed, staff risk to be sent chasing a red herring - a situation which would never occur with their officially supported customers. Such scenarios are of little value to Proxmox to troubleshoot - they will not catch any error a “paying customer” would appreciate not encountering in “enterprise software.”

Downgrade to enterprise

And finally, the reason why Proxmox VE comes preset with enterprise as opposed to no-subscription repository even as it inconveniences most of the users is the potential issue (and non-trivial solution to figure out) an “enterprise customer” were to face when “upgrading” to enterprise repository - which would need them to downgrade back to some of the very same packages that are on the free tier, but are behind the most recent ones. How much behind can vary, an urgent bugfix can escalate the upgrade path at times, as Proxmox do not seem to ever backport such fixes.

Nothing is really free, after all.

What you can do

If you do not mind any of the above, you can certainly have the initial no-subscription setup streamlined by setting up the unpaid repositories. You CAN also get rid of the inexplicable “no subscription” popup - both safely and in full accordance with the license of AGPL. That one is NOT the part of the price you HAVE TO pay. You will still be supporting Proxmox by reporting (or posting about) any bug you have found - at your own expense.