Dear pgModeler Community,

For nearly 20 years, pgModeler has been a labor of love. What started as a personal tool has grown into a comprehensive PostgreSQL modeling platform used by thousands of developers and companies worldwide. My commitment has always been to provide a high-quality and independent solution for the PostgreSQL ecosystem. As we enter the Nullptr Labs era and move toward the stable release of version 2.0, I need to address a challenge that directly impacts the future of the project: long-term sustainability.

Developing and maintaining advanced features such as reverse engineering, diff/sync engine, and database management requires an immense amount of highly specialized work. These modules must continuously evolve alongside PostgreSQL itself, its extensions, and the growing ecosystem of PostgreSQL-compatible platforms. At the current scale of the project, the existing revenue is no longer sufficient to sustainably cover infrastructure, operational costs, taxes, and the thousands of engineering hours required to maintain pgModeler at a professional level.

Like many independent infrastructure tools in the PostgreSQL ecosystem, pgModeler has reached a point where relying solely on unsustainable volunteer effort is no longer viable. My goal with Nullptr Labs is to ensure that pgModeler remains actively developed, independent, and focused entirely on the needs of its users for many years to come.

The strategic change

To ensure the continued evolution of the project and avoid long-term stagnation or abandonment, I am making an important change to the distribution model starting with version 2.0.0-beta.

• pgModeler Community (Open source): The Community Edition will remain free and open source. It will continue to focus on visual data modeling, PostgreSQL schema design, SQL generation, and educational or development workflows. Most importantly, the Community Edition will continue receiving active maintenance, PostgreSQL compatibility updates, usability improvements, bug fixes, performance enhancements, and continuous evolution over time. The Community Edition remains the foundation of the pgModeler platform itself. Since the commercial edition is built on top of the same core architecture, improvements to the platform core will continue benefiting the open-source version as well.

• pgModeler Plus (Commercial edition): Starting with version 2.0.0-beta, advanced database lifecycle management features — specifically reverse Engineering, database diff & Synchronization, and live database management — will continue development exclusively within the Plus edition. These capabilities require a disproportionate amount of long-term maintenance, testing, and PostgreSQL-specific engineering effort, while also representing the features most directly tied to professional and enterprise workflows.

Respecting our Open Source roots

I want to be completely transparent about this transition. The source code history for these functionalities will remain available in the repository up to version 2.0.0-alpha1 under the original open-source license terms. Starting from version 2.0.0-beta, development of these specific modules will continue exclusively within the commercial edition. Developers who wish to independently maintain or extend the previous open-source implementation remain free to fork the project from the 2.0.0-alpha1 tag in accordance with the existing license.

However, to avoid confusion within the PostgreSQL ecosystem and the broader community, independent forks or redistributed versions derived from the open-source codebase must adopt their own distinct names and branding. The names “pgModeler” and “Nullptr Labs”, as well as their associated logos and visual identities, are registered trademarks and intellectual property of Nullptr Labs and may not be used to represent unofficial distributions without prior authorization.

Why this matters

This transition allows Nullptr Labs to reinvest directly into the future of pgModeler. A sustainable financial model enables continued investment in:

• Support for PostgreSQL forks and platforms such as Supabase, TimescaleDB, YugabyteDB, and Redshift;
• Major usability and productivity improvements;
• Modern workflow integrations;
• Long-term platform stability;
• Faster delivery of highly requested features.

I strongly believe that professional tools used in professional environments should be sustainably supported by the industry and users who depend on them. My commitment remains the same: to continue improving pgModeler every day, maintain its independence, and deliver a reliable PostgreSQL-focused platform for the community and professional users alike. This transition is not about leaving open source behind. It is about ensuring that the project can continue to exist, evolve, and thrive over the next decade.

As a final note, the first public beta of pgModeler 2.0.0 is expected to be released within the next one to two weeks, marking the beginning of a new phase focused on long-term evolution for the project.

Thank you for nearly two decades of support, trust, feedback, and contributions. I hope to have you with me as pgModeler continues its journey into the future.

Raphael Araújo e Silva
Founder, Nullptr Labs