◎ Open Design

Team Rollout Proposal · Northwind Design

Bring the design team
onto open infrastructure.
One quarter, one bill.

A rollout plan for moving Northwind's 14-seat design team off a closed cloud suite onto Open Design — local-first, BYOK, Apache-2.0.

Prepared for Priya Shah (Design) & Marcus Webb (IT)1 / 8

The pain

Locked in.
Paying full freight.

Northwind's design team runs on a closed-cloud AI design suite: one vendor, one model, no self-hosting — and IT still can't sign off because design files never touch our own infrastructure.

Open Design2 / 8

01 · The current cost

$84,000 a year
for a locked platform.

▣

The seat tax

$500 per seat, per month, across 14 seats — $84,000/yr whether the team ships five prototypes or fifty.

◈

Vendor lock-in

Locked to one model, one vendor. No agent choice, no negotiating leverage at renewal.

◐

IT can't approve it

Design files live entirely in the vendor's cloud. Security review has stalled expansion past 14 seats twice this year.

Open Design3 / 8

02 · The proposed change

Local-first, BYOK,
owned outright.

Self-hosted

Runs on each designer's machine. Files stay on Northwind's network, not a vendor's cloud.

Bring your own model

Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure, or Google — Northwind controls spend and vendor risk directly.

Apache-2.0

Fully open source. IT can audit, fork, and self-host — no seat-based contract to renegotiate.

Open Design4 / 8

03 · The proof

Already trusted
at scale.

✦

60K+ GitHub stars

One of the fastest-growing open-source design platforms, with 300+ contributors shipping in public under Apache-2.0.

✧

200+ plugins, 129 design systems

A live ecosystem of prototypes, decks, and dashboards — evidence teams actually adopt it, not just install it.

Open Design5 / 8

Rollout plan

Four weeks to full adoption.

1

Week 1 — Pilot with 3 designers

IT installs locally, connects the existing Anthropic key, and imports Northwind's current brand kit as a design system.

2

Weeks 2–3 — Team onboarding

The remaining 11 seats onboard. Prior brand assets and design memory carry over; IT reviews local audit logs.

3

Week 4 — Cut over

Legacy seats are cancelled at the renewal boundary. Northwind owns the toolchain outright, no vendor dependency.

Open Design6 / 8

Commercial ask

Approve the switch
at renewal.

Closed Cloud Suite · today

$7,000/mo

14 seats × $500. Locked to one model, cloud-only.

  • Locked to one vendor
  • No self-hosting, no BYOK
  • Renews automatically next quarter

Open Design · BYOK · proposed

~$1,020/mo

14 seats at ~$73 in model costs — 85% less than today.

  • 21 coding agents, any model
  • Full-stack BYOK, IT-approved
  • Runs locally, files stay on our network
  • Design memory compounds over time

Self-hosted, forever

$0

Apache-2.0. The platform itself is free, forever.

  • Fork and self-host
  • Commercial use allowed
  • 300+ contributors maintaining it
Open Design7 / 8

Next step

"We cut our design tooling bill by 83% and finally got IT's yes — because the files never leave our network."

— Design Ops Lead, mid-market retail · early adopter

Open · Local · Agent-native

85%
Approve the Northwind rollout →

Savings vs. today's suite · Pilot starts within 5 business days · github.com/nexu-io/open-design

Open Design8 / 8