Free Tier for a small public-sector site — what happens on key expiry / discontinuation?

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Hi all,

We run a public-facing website for a local public institution (municipality-level, ~70,000 residents) currently on Liferay 7.4 CE, self-hosted via Docker. We’re planning our migration path now that CE has been sunset, and we’re seriously considering Free Tier as the ongoing solution rather than Enterprise, since our scale and needs fit well within Free Tier’s stated scope.

Before committing, we’d like to understand the operational risk around activation key expiry, since this is public infrastructure that needs to stay reliably available:

  1. If a Free Tier activation key is not renewed in time (e.g. an oversight, or a renewal request that isn’t approved fast enough), what exactly happens to a running instance? Specifically: does only the admin/control panel become inaccessible, or does the public-facing site (pages served to visitors) also stop rendering?
  2. Is there any grace period between expiry and any enforcement action, or does enforcement begin immediately at the expiry timestamp?
  3. Is Free Tier intended/expected to remain available long-term for small production deployments like ours, or should we plan around the possibility that Liferay could discontinue or significantly restrict the Free Tier program in the future? We’re trying to understand how much to treat Free Tier as a stable long-term foundation versus a bridge we should have a fallback plan for.
  4. Related to #3 — for organizations in our position (small public sector, self-hosted, no realistic Enterprise budget), is there guidance on what a sensible fallback/exit plan looks like if Free Tier access were ever withdrawn?

We’d rather plan for this properly upfront than find out during an actual incident. Any clarity from the Liferay team (or others who’ve already dealt with this) would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

1 Answer

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Hi @Igor_Blanco,

Thanks for joining Discuss, and thanks for your questions - I’ll do my best to answer them:

  1. This one is pretty straightforward - without a valid activation key Liferay DXP will only display a “This instance is not activated” screen. That applies to both Admins and regular logged-in users, and anyone browsing a site anonymously. But - this isn’t a situation that you should run into (see below).
  2. No, there’s no grace period - BUT (and this is the important bit) you will start getting notifications that the activation key is going to expire well before it actually does. This will start 30 days before your key is due to expire, giving you plenty of time to generate a new one. You can read more information about that here:
    How do I receive notifications when my activation keys are about to expire? - Customer Portal - support.lxc.liferay.com
  3. Yes, it is. We have no plans to discontinue the Free Tier. Of course, it would be disingenuous of me to say “never” because I can’t predict the future, but one of our objectives is to show Free Tier users the benefits of a paid subscription and the additional features that a subscription provides. You will get continuous access to new releases each quarter, all of which will included new features. But, there will also be features that are only available to Liferay DXP subscribers, as well as modules that can be purchased by Free Tier users without a DXP subscription - like AI Hub and Liferay Data Platform.
  4. Well, as I said above, there’s no plan to do this, but, the source-code for Liferay DXP is open and public, and there’s nothing to stop people building from the source. Being Open Source is a fundamental part of our DNA.

In addition to this, we have been working on a lower-cost subscription offering that will be available for smaller solutions and also most likely for public sector organisations. This might be a viable option for a site of your size. Of course it’s important to understand that if you are running Liferay DXP Free Tier in production it is not “free” - you’re still paying for infrastructure, for someone (even if it’s your own employees) to provide support, and so on. The best option for production implementations will always be a paid subscription - but this is not intended to be a hard sell, so I’ll leave it there!

One final point is that while the keys do expire in 1 year, you can actually generate new keys at any stage. If you wanted to create a new one every 6 months, that would be fine, and that would always push your end date out by a further 6 months, reducing the likelihood of you running into the expiring key situation!

Hope that helps - if you’ve got any more questions please let me know here, or if you would prefer via DM.

Cheers,

Ben

Thank you very much. That clarifies most of my concerns. Being able to request a new key in advance definitively helps to mitigate the lock-down anxiety.

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