I hoped I would never have to write this post.
When I first released AL Object ID Ninja back in September 2021, my dream was simple — to give every Business Central developer a painless way to manage object IDs, forever free.
And for four years, that dream held true.
Ninja has quietly prevented hundreds of thousands of conflicts across thousands of teams. It became the invisible backbone of smooth collaboration for our community — always there, always free.
But as Ninja grew, so did the infrastructure behind it. What once cost a few peanuts now costs a small fortune every month. To keep it running fast, reliable, and evolving, it’s time for Ninja to take its next step — from a free community service to a sustainable, premium platform.
What’s changing — and when
You can continue using Ninja for free until 31 December 2025.
After that, you’ll have two options:
- Self-host Ninja on your own Azure subscription — and keep it free forever.
- Subscribe to the new Premium Ninja backend — and enjoy a hassle-free, continuously improving experience.
Either way, you stay in control.
Read on if you want to learn more.
Why subscribe?
Because subscribing means you get to focus on building great apps — and let Ninja take care of the rest.
The Premium plan will include:
- 🚀 Zero setup, zero maintenance — just keep using Ninja as you do now.
- 🌟 Exclusive new features — subscribers will get the full roadmap of improvements.
- 🧭 Dedicated support — real help when you need it.
- 📊 Ninja Hub — a new management portal (and mobile app!) to monitor your teams, apps, and object IDs with ease.
It’s the same simple tool you love — now backed by a sustainable model that guarantees it will stay that way.
What will it cost?
The goal is simple: make it affordable for everyone.
Pricing will be based on fair usage — likely per app, with flexible options for small teams and larger partners. There will even be a free tier for minimal consumption.
In short: it won’t hurt. But it will make a real difference.
Prefer to stay free?
No problem. You can deploy your own backend at any time.
Here’s the full guide:
👉 Deploy your own backend
You’ll carry your own Azure costs and maintenance, but Ninja will remain free and open to you.
Will it really be free for you if you choose to go your own way?
Yes (absolutely). But (with a few caveats).
“Yes” because you’ll always be able to run Ninja on your own backend, entirely under your control, without ever paying me a cent.
“But” because full independence comes with a bit of extra work.
Ninja will continue to evolve — new features, performance improvements, and backend updates will keep coming. Each new release may require you to re-deploy, re-configure, or re-sync your data. It’s all documented and perfectly doable, but it does take time and care.
I’ll never deliberately make things harder for self-hosted users, but my focus will naturally be on making life as smooth as possible for subscribers. That means when something changes, paying customers will glide through seamlessly — while self-hosted users may need to roll up their sleeves now and then.
In short: free forever, if you’re ready to manage it yourself — or effort-free forever, if you’d rather I handle it for you.
The road ahead
Over the next few weeks, I’ll release an update that introduces reminders about the change, and a brand-new website where you’ll be able to manage your subscription and track your usage.
This is not the end of free Ninja — it’s the beginning of a stronger, sustainable Ninja that can keep serving the BC community for years to come.
Thank you for being part of this journey — and if you decide to stay on board, I promise to make it worth every penny.
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Is there any approximate cost that you can share in advance.
Will it be 20, 50 or 100 € per month per company?
(Those are only example values)
Some companies needs at least an approximate value to approve such services.
There is a calculator here: https://alidninja.com/
The price you see there is the maximum you can expect (provided the number of apps and users you provide is correct). Fill in that form, and if the price looks fair, just submit. If not, ping me and we’ll talk.
Thanks. I didn’t recognize the calculator at first since I didn’t entered any values there.
We’re currently discussing internally to use the hassle-free option.
One Feedback was that developers want a timeline to get the Ninja to work with Extension Objects.
(Our Developers want to create enum extension for apps in our App ID Range (As outlined in the open PR: https://github.com/vjekob/al-objid/pull/78)
This will for sure happen during January, both for Table and Enum extensions.
In the deploy manual you say Node.js version 14 – so that means that you currently use 2 years unmaintained software or is it like the minimal version to run it?
This only means that I haven’t changed the instructions for how to deploy on own infrastructure, nothing more. It’s the minimum version.
When deploying the minimal azure functions runtime is currently 4.x. The github version refers to version 2.x, and such upgrade requires some code changes (eg. register triggers explicitly). Do you plan to bring this to the latest version ?
we noticed the current repo is written for azure functions version 2.x. If you want to deploy this today, the minimal version available is version 4.x. But this requires quiet some rework for the code (making triggers available, etc.). Do you plan to update this to Azure Functions version 4 ?
Yes, I will bring the repo to the latest version. During December there will be a few updates, but I can’t promise exactly when. I’m primarily focused on getting the paid users to newest version of everything which must be finished by December 31.