I pulled that directly from the Discourse JSON API. New topics in the Dash Python category dropped from ~50/month in mid-2025 to ~11/month in mid-2026, and median views per new topic fell from ~140 to ~85.
This is difficult for me to make and I feel like i’m just talking to an empty room most of the time. I’d like to start with stating this - The code, the dash framework is in good shape. – Dash 4.x, React 19, FastAPI support and plotly.py 7.0 all shipped recently. You all are amazing engineers but my concern is not that. My concern is governance, community, and the boundary between what’s open and what’s paid. Here’s what I have as concerns and I think a lot of other builders would like answered.
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Commitment and roadmap
- Is Dash committed to remaining MIT-licensed indefinitly? Is there any circumstance under which Plotly would relicense to BSL, SSPL, or a source-available license?
- Is there a published open-source roadmap for Dash separate from the Dash Enterprise release roadmap? If not, will there ever be one? Roadmap - Plotly
- How many full-time engineers are funded to work on plotly/dash, plotly.py, and plotly.js specifically, as opposed to Enterprise, Studio, or Cloud?
- What is the plan if Plotly is acquired? Would Dash go to a foundation, or would it transfer with the company?
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The open / paid boundary
- What is the durable line between “this belongs in open-source Dash” and “this belongs in Enterprise/Studio/Cloud”? Is that line written down anywhere a contributor can read before they start building?
- Has any capability that previously lived in open-source Dash, or was announced for it, moved into a paid tier? If so, which?
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Community health
- New topics in the Dash Python forum category have fallen roughly 75% in the last twelve months, and median views per thread are down about 40%. Is the company tracking this? What does it attribute it to?
- Is there still a community manager role at Plotly? Who holds it, and what is that person resourced to do?
- Given that developers increasingly ask coding agents rather than forums — is the forum still the intended home for the Dash community, or is the company deliberately letting it wind down in favor of something else? Either answer is fine; not knowing is the problem.
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Contributor economics
- If Plotly ships first-party functionality that duplicates a widely-used community library, what is the process — is the author told in advance?
- Is there a path for an independent developer to build a business on Dash that Plotly actively supports rather than competes with? What does that look like concretely?
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Data, IP and AI
- What are the current terms governing content posted to community.plotly.com? Is that content used to train or fine-tune any model, or included in Plotly AI / Studio retrieval?
- Is code submitted in forum posts, GitHub issues, or PRs treated differently from contributed code under the repository license?
- Does Plotly Studio or Plotly AI transmit user data or user code off the local machine? The marketing says code stays local during development — what exactly leaves the machine, and when?
- If Plotly were acquired or wound down, what happens to forum content, user accounts, and hosted apps on Plotly Cloud?
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Viability and the big asks
- Reported total funding for Plotly sits under $12M across public sources for a thirteen-year-old company. Is the company profitable, or is it burning? A team betting a five-year roadmap on Dash needs to be able to reason about this.
- Plotly Cloud at $29/seat is a self-serve motion, which is new for this company. Is that now the primary growth bet, and does Dash open source function as the top of that funnel?
- The ask: will someone with roadmap authority — not only community relations — do a public, recorded conversation with the Plotly champions that would like to contribute , on a recurring basis? Quarterly is enough. A single one-off doesn’t fix the single-point-of-contact problem.
Once again I’ll finish with this, the engineering is visibly healthy and more impressive and powerful than ever but the governance and communication is visibly absent. Their is a lot of people that have been here for a long time, people that have placed their careers and years of engineering into what is this open source.
I never graduated college and I started my life at a clear disadvantage. Learning this language, this framework and building alongside it at the start was a difficult but worthwhile path for me to better my life. The industry has many issues, I’d assume you all have your own war stories. The concerns I face are a fleeting path available for others to make careers in this space, a shrinking pool of talent and opportunity and community that I feel like could be corrected. The issues I have are that the company has shaken to a degree it’s un-reconizable.
Anyway this is and has been good-faith, even within the worst of times. I wan’t this community, the company that launched it and those that build within it to succeed. However I feel a responsibility to ask the difficult questions, make a fuss as I drove people to invest in this company, financially, their time, their career. I was one of your biggest cheer leaders, a Plotly Champion and a colleague the issue is you never saw me or others as colleagues only ever customers.