Justifying Cockpit Pro licence

General
1

Hi!

I am currently dabbling with Cockpit and I would like to use it on a new client website - Cockpit checks all the boxes for this project.

Also, I am thinking of purchasing the Pro licence, a few of the pro add-ons would definitely come in handy. But I have trouble with justifying the pro licence price tag. The documentation is scarce(I get this is mostly a one man project, also open-sourced) but still.

For example, I needed to search both Cockpit Github and Discourse pages to find out that WYSIWG editor is now based on Tiptap, there are no docs on extending it etc. Apparently there is also a way of querying/filtering data with vanilla PHP, but it is not documented anywhere(BTW I would certainly use this feature if it is available).

Same for unique fields, slugs, etc. One needs to look through Github issues and posts here on the forum to find how things work.

And that is perfectly fine, this is an open source project after all - but the problem is that all of the above remains the same even if Pro licence is purchased.

For comparison sake, Statamic, Kirby or Craft have very detailed docs for the same price tag or less in case of Kirby.

From my experience, better docs equal greater adoption. Greater adoption equals more pro licences, less basic forum questions, etc.

P.S.
And please don’t get me wrong, I really love how Cockpit works, pro licence is perfectly fine for helping the project stay afloat but without proper documentation all of the above unfortunately doesn’t matter…

2

Hi :wave:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. It’s great to hear Cockpit suits your project. I understand your concerns about the documentation. I’ll work on it in 2025.

A Pro License helps to improve the platform and the docs, plus it includes prioritized support for quicker help with any issues. If you have more questions, just let me know.
Any input is always appreciated.

Best,
Artur

3

Yeah i‘d like to extend our existing pro licenses but i don‘t know how to do that :smile:

4

Hey Artur! Sorry for the late reply.

Thanks for taking the time to answer - I understand what you are saying and what Pro licence means in terms of supporting the platform etc.

I am all for it, but unfortunately lack of documentation translates to more hurdles while building something. This may not be the case for someone more skilled, who can look into the source code and find answers. I am not that one :slight_smile:

P.S.
Regarding the any input appreciated bit - can you please tell me what is the purpose of the blank page with the Hello message, which is the first thing you see when logging into Cockpit?

If it can’t be easily removed or upgraded with stats/widgets/other content, it is just bad UX - one unnecessary step that clients/users must deal with every time they login.