Licensing

Faktory Pro and Enterprise are commercial -- you purchase them 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 or production and only pay for production servers. The default environment is development, you must enable production.

Pricing

Faktory Pro is priced per production server. If you have 4 teams, each with their own app and Faktory server, you need to purchase a license for 4 servers.

Faktory Enterprise is priced according to total concurrent worker connections with the base price allowing 100 connections, typically enough to perform millions of jobs per day. The number of current worker 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.

Development

In development, I envision a team of developers, all starting a Faktory server on their own laptops to develop their applications. In development mode, Faktory Pro/Ent 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 Pro/Ent is started with FAKTORY_ENV=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.

Production

With a production server, you start Faktory Pro/Ent with FAKTORY_ENV=production.

• The server will exit unless FAKTORY_LICENSE is set or /etc/faktory/license is valid.
• 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.

All of these points are logged on startup. 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.