Question about Drizzle ORM's long-term sustainability and funding model

[RicSala]

Hi Drizzle team! 👋

First, I want to say thank you for building such an excellent ORM. The TypeScript experience is fantastic, and the performance characteristics are impressive. Your work on making SQL more accessible while maintaining type safety is truly appreciated.

I'm currently evaluating Drizzle ORM for several production projects, and like many in the community, I'm trying to make informed decisions about our technical stack. One concern that's been difficult to address is understanding Drizzle's long-term sustainability model.

Is there a current or planned monetization strategy?

Like...how can we be sure Drizzle will stay in the longterm?

A lot of good OS projects ended up disapearing without a clear funding model (Moment.js, Request, etc). I love the project but that risk alone is enough to prevent me from saying good bye to prisma (which has a clear - sometimes a bit too clear 😅 - monetization strategy).

Would you consider adding a "Sustainability" or "Funding" section to your documentation? This transparency would help the community understand how we can support the project's long-term health.

I would really appreciate some insights here.

[AndriiSherman]

Hey @RicSala!
Thanks for your message and all the kind words - it means a lot to us!

The Drizzle Team is self-sustainable, and we work full-time on various open-source projects like drizzle-orm, drizzle-kit, waddler, hanji, drizzle-seed, and more. You can check out our website to see all the OSS work we support, as well as the number of sponsors we have. While it's not yet enough to operate fully as a company, it provides a solid foundation to continue working full-time at this pace

To support our sustainability, we also have paid products like Embedded Drizzle Studio, which is integrated into many dashboards, including Neon, Replit, Turso, and ~7 other companies via licensing. This helps us stay sustainable and gather valuable feedback to improve Studio continuously.

We also have an outsourcing track we've been running for nearly 10 years, completing over 200 projects ranging from small to enterprise-level. It helps us fund OSS development and also allows us to dogfood the libraries, tools, and products we build. Everything we work on is used internally on our outsource projects - or built for our needs first, then open-sourced (just like Drizzle itself, 3 years ago).

We’re now a team of 15 developers working full-time on Drizzle. Recently, we registered an LLC in Ukraine to gain more freedom in collaborating with companies globally and offering our expertise more formally. Previously, there were many limitations to operating from Ukraine without a legal entity. It’s still a bit challenging, but it opens new doors for us to show our presence worldwide.

The Drizzle Team isn’t going anywhere - we’re fully committed to making the TypeScript data ecosystem significantly better. We’re always open to donations, happy to onboard you to a Drizzle Studio license (which will be rebranded soon), or collaborate as developers on any projects you'd like to build

[AndriiSherman]

You can always email me, so we can set up a call to chat more

[mdevils]

@AndriiSherman sorry to ask, but this is kind of confusing to me. We've considered to use drizzle ORM some time ago, but not it's unclear to us if drizzle is at all maintained.

The whole first page of Pull Requests has zero replies from maintainers. Our own pull-request which we created 2 weeks ago has no replies.

Is drizzle-orm still alive or we should consider switching to a different ORM?

[AndriiSherman]

We are going through a full rewrite of the drizzle-kit part - diffs, push and generate strategies, folder structure, etc. This is one of the final preparation steps before releasing v1.0.
Here is the PR - as you can see, it includes changes to over 400 files and adds ~100k lines of code.

It’s all about priorities, and we need to finalize our architecture to enter v1.0 with a solid and flexible structure. This will help us accept PRs faster, ship new features more quickly, and fix bugs more efficiently.

We’re also going through PRs as actively as we can to ensure we’re addressing the issues developers have raised. Here’s a small portion of the larger table we use to track our progress.

Unfortunately, we can’t review everything quickly - each PR needs discussion to ensure we’re merging changes that are a good fit for the Drizzle codebase.

[RicSala]

Hey @RicSala! Thanks for your message and all the kind words - it means a lot to us!
...

More than enough to give me a solid view and the confidence needed, thank you.