Buy once. Own forever.
A perpetual source code license. Not a subscription.
Everything included
Works out of the box, no customization required
Complete TypeScript/SvelteKit source code
Deploy anywhere: SQLite, Postgres, Docker
9 languages built in
Modify and rebrand freely
No recurring fees. No vendor lock-in.
No waiting on someone else's roadmap
Why this model
SaaS is a liability. You pay monthly. The moment you stop paying, you lose access. Every dollar spent on SaaS is gone the day the subscription ends. A perpetual source code license is an asset. You pay once. The code is yours. The value compounds instead of draining.
A canvas, not a cage.
Primer ships as a complete, working product. Install it and it runs. You don't have to reshape anything to start getting value. And if your organization has a different vocabulary, a different visual style, or existing systems to plug into, you own the source code and can change any of it whenever it suits you. Ready on day one. Yours to evolve on your own schedule.
Your roadmap, not ours.
The biggest reason free updates barely matter: you stopped waiting for them.
Typical SaaS
Submit. Vote. Wait.
You file a feature request and join a queue of thousands. A product manager you'll never meet decides if it ships. Six months later the status is still 'Future Consideration.' Public trackers at major SaaS vendors still hold tickets filed in 2017, with hundreds of votes and no answer.
Primer
Just build it.
You own the source code on day one. Move buttons, change colors, add integrations, yourself, today. Pull our updates when they're useful. Ignore them when they're not. By the time we ship a release, your version already fits your team better than ours ever could.
Total cost of ownership
How Primer compares to a typical SaaS subscription for a 50-person team.
| Primer | Typical SaaS | You save | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | $5,000 | $18,000 | $13,000 |
| Year 3 | $5,000 | $54,000 | $49,000 |
| Year 5 | $5,000 | $90,000 | $85,000 |
At Year 3, a SaaS tool has cost you $54,000 and counting. Primer is still that same $5,000 you paid three years ago.
* SaaS estimate based on $30/user/month for 50 users