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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
A lot of independent developers using Dash build their business around building custom solutions either for internal customers or for external customers (“implementation partners”). Depending on the type of solutions this can either be done without (“free beer” from Plotly) or it can be combined with Plotly’s commercial offerings.
Building a solution on top of someone else’s work always needs a risk/benefit assessment, but Plotly has been around for quite some time and the library is mature. From my perspective this business model is well supported, at least my team is not missing something from Plotly here and I don’t see a big potential for conflicts here.
Building complementary offerings that are of generic “add-on nature” beside Dash is a lot different.
I’m not sure that the Plotly Dash market share and Plotly’s company size is big enough to support such a kind of business.
Even if you look at big enterprises (e.g. Salesforce, Microsoft) that do have such “add-on provider” partnerships and are not limited to implementation partners, transparency and guarantees are often very limited, if they exist at all and most of the time reserved for the few partners that significantly drive license sales.
That being said, I still think that it would be interesting to hear back from Plotly regarding some of your questions!
Don’t need anyone to buy me a free beer or even be a direct supplier for my tap, just think ontap we should have and support more options to market than just Boxer Beer lol From my experiences its as if the province flipped and banned U.S. alcoholic beverages.
I created some nice Tito’s vodka and we are all stuck sitting in a lonely dark room getting drunk off our own supply.
A rising tide raises all ships, a tide pull back lowers all ships. The issue is theirs only a handful left on the water. Some of the issues are self inflicted and some are industry wide.
We have more of the engineering handled by ai, have more free time than ever, yet we cant meet up at the bar and talk. We are facing more difficulties than ever. Its of my opinion we should be opening up more regional based bars, establish supply chains for open source to expand and communicate better rather than isolate. Your bar succeeds, plotly sells more boxer beer and i sell more tito’s and that scales out to support new providers, more engineering, more options and opportunities within the industry.
I’ve broken this framework in the best ways possible, this dash framework isn’t a graphing library its much more capable than that. I build obs systems, video games, e-commerce platforms, iot management systems and components and tools that mostly extend out ways to build something amazing enterprise level outside of a generated chart. You made a lot of good points thanks for jumping in on this.
I totally agree and would love to see an even more thriving community - a major challenge for many projects.
I’m not sure if I get this one right. For example, we do have projects like DMC and DBC where it seems to me that Plotly does definitely not work against them, although they “compete” in some ways with the “Dash Enterprise Design Kit”.
Could you detail that? (might be that I have been too ignorant to things happening lately…)
Not going to elaborate for the moment, doesn’t feel right to just unload on them much further at this moment. Their aware, going to give them time to respond rather than overload.
As the lead maintainer of Dash Mantine Components, I can tell you that Plotly is extremely supportive of community projects.
Here is just one concrete example. The upstream Mantine library made a change to require a context manager (The dmc.MantineProvider). This change resulted in a decrease in performance in dash apps. It was reported here:
This issue did not affect any of Plotly’s own component libraries. It only affected community projects like DMC and FAC (feffery-antd-components)
The Plotly team made a substantial change to Dash Renderer to address the issue. That work became part of the Dash 3.0 release.
This is a clear example of Plotly supporting community projects.
I wish we had the same experiences @AnnMarieW i have a lot of respect for you. However we are not in the same position. Your career isn’t tied or dependent on Plotly the same way my career is. I appreciate you jumping in on this but a 2yr old github pr doesn’t replace the need for clearity or an open dialog between the open source and the company that manages it.
