20 TiB of MooseFS Pro, Free, and Why We Did It
With MooseFS 5 we wanted to give anyone the opportunity to run PRO for personal, non-commercial use. So we built that into the licensing model itself — and the free 20 TiB has been part of the Personal tier since MooseFS 5 launched, not something we added later.
It has two tiers, Personal and Enterprise, priced by used raw space rather than by subscription term or seat count. We want to explain what the number actually means, where the 20 TiB threshold comes from, who ends up running a cluster inside it, and why it isn’t the trial license it might look like.
Two tiers, one threshold
The Personal tier is capped at 200 TiB of used raw space and priced at €9 per TiB beyond the free allowance. The Enterprise tier drops that cap and licenses capacity without a ceiling of its own, up to the 16 EiB the product supports. The 20 TiB threshold sits inside the Personal tier’s pricing. It’s the slice of the 200 TiB cap that costs nothing, not a separate promotion sitting on top of it. Take a cluster running 50 TiB of used raw space, for example. The first 20 TiB are free and the remaining 30 TiB cost €9 each — €270 in total, paid once rather than billed monthly.
What the license actually counts
The figure the license checks is used raw space — what your data occupies on Chunkserver disks once redundancy is counted in, not the capacity of the disks you’ve attached. A cluster with a petabyte of disks and 15 TiB of data on them stays inside a 20 TiB license. Buying more disks doesn’t move the threshold, writing more data does. It’s the same figure mfslicinfo reports once a license is installed, so the number you check before buying is the same one the running cluster enforces afterward.
Who runs at 20 TiB
The free allowance carries the same restriction as the rest of the Personal tier. It’s licensed for personal, non-commercial use. That’s who runs a cluster inside the 20 TiB — someone using MooseFS PRO for their own project, at a scale where 20 TiB of used raw space is the whole cluster, not a fraction of a larger one.
Why it isn’t a trial
None of that makes it a trial. An evaluation license carries an expiry date. Once that date arrives, the cluster stops running. The free 20 TiB doesn’t. It’s part of a perpetual license that costs nothing up to 20 TiB and keeps running for as long as usage stays under the cap. The feature set isn’t reduced either. Personal and Enterprise run the same POSIX file system, snapshots, trash bin, quotas, storage classes, erasure coding, automatic high availability, and multilocations. What changes between the tiers is capacity and the level of support behind it — community versus 24/7, not what the software does.
Further reading
What a PRO license counts and how it reaches a Master Server is covered in Licensing. The feature-by-feature difference between Personal and Enterprise is in Open-source Community Edition vs. PRO version. Installing the license file itself is covered in Install a license.