I just received an email saying “Your Duplicati trial will expire on 2026-01-16” from noreply@mailer.duplicati.com.
Honestly, I’m kind of shocked.
I’ve always associated Duplicati with being free and open source, simple and community-driven. I never expected to get a trial expiration email from them.
So I have a few questions and I hope someone can clarify:
Is this email actually legit?
It looks real, but it feels strange for an open-source project to send trial expiry mails like this.
Why is it no longer fully free?
Did something change recently in their licensing or business model?
Did this email only come because I created an account?
I’m guessing this is related to their hosted / cloud / managed offering?
If I had never created an account, would I never have received this email?
Meaning: local/self-hosted Duplicati usage without any account is still unaffected?
I’m not trying to hate here – I genuinely liked the software a lot because of how simple it was and because it was promoted as open source.
But getting a trial expiration notice was really unexpected and a bit unsettling.
Would appreciate factual clarification, not marketing talk.
Duplicati Inc is founded with an Open Core model, where the open source client is further developed as open source, but with additional enterprise focused tools and services as a paid feature.
That’s new business model. Open source client went MIT license.
IMO community contributions are down but Duplicati Inc.'s are up.
As a community volunteer, I’m happy to get help from any source.
The Duplicati client is open-source and free to use.
The Duplicati console is a proprietary solution that adds management features to the open-source client. The email is from the Duplicati console.
Yes.
The open-source client is fully free and open-source, the console has a free usage tier (and a free trial).
Yes.
Yes.
There is no requirement to use the console. If your setup does not benefit from using the console, feel free to not use it.
See the links from @ts678 for more details, but generally Duplicati Inc is using an Open Core model where we sell some services which helps pay for development of the open source project.
