Business model

Material-UI SAS (trading as MUI) is a for-profit company that balances the need to improve MUI’s open-source projects with the need to add source-available features to generate income, to better advance its mission (the same one as the open-source projects).

We have an open core business model and generate almost all of our revenue by selling products around the MIT ones.

We have tried different business models, and many didn’t work. As a company, we realized that we needed recurring revenue to continue our mission, so introduced “source available” code that is proprietary with the hope that it would allow us to have a much larger impact.

Initially, there were worried that it might not work, but the community saw the opposite: this change allowed us to accelerate the work on the open-source code to advance our mission.

Promises

We promise that:

  1. When a feature is intentionally open-sourced in a stable version we won't subsequently move that feature to a paid tier. Features might be removed from the open-source codebase in other cases, for example when we realize that not enough developers are using it to make it worth the effort to maintain. To be clear, this promise only applies to open-sourced features, features in paid tiers might move to a higher tier.
  2. We won't introduce features into the open-source codebase with a fixed delay, if a feature is planned to land in both it will be released simultaneously in both.
  3. The open-source codebase will have all the features that are essential to building a design system with MUI and building simple apps.
  4. All elements of the product (e.g. design system, design kit (Figma only), templates, low-code) will have some open-source features.
  5. The majority of new features made by MUI will be open source.
  6. We will make our free tier easily discoverable.
  7. The open-source product will be available for download from a link above the fold on the desktop homepage without you having to submit an email address or sign in.
  8. We will always release and open-source all tests that we have for an open-source feature.
  9. We will always make it clear what is proprietary and what is open-source code.
  10. We will always allow you to benchmark the performance of MUI.

What features are paid-only

TODO