Source-available, BUSL-1.1
Audit the parser that touches your files. Every version becomes Apache-2.0 after four years.
01About · the association
A product company,
shaped like a non-profit.
Rendlio is built and sold by the Rendlio Association (Verein Rendlio), an association under Swiss law based in Aarau, Switzerland. The structure is unusual on purpose: nobody owns Rendlio, nobody can sell it, and no member can ever take a distribution. The product competes on commercial-grade terms; the profits go to charity.
02Mission · why this exists
Honest rendering,
honest economics.
The mission is a piece of infrastructure the world keeps rebuilding badly: rendering Excel workbooks exactly as they print, self-hosted, with every limitation disclosed instead of hidden. The association exists to build that engine, publish its source, sell licences at a flat per-entity price — and give the surplus away.
Product terms, source access, and enterprise support remain commercial-grade. Buying from a non-profit should feel like buying from the most trustworthy vendor you know, not like making a donation.
Our public-benefit commitment100% of profits go to charity.
No phone-home. Ever.
Offline licence files, ES256-signed. The analyzers that forbid network calls run on every commit.
Escrow & provenance
Source escrow for Enterprise, signed releases, and an SBOM per build—procurement questionnaires welcome.
Public fidelity corpus
Acceptance scores are published and reproducible. We show the corpus, not adjectives.
03Governance · how the association works
Written into the statutes,
not into a pitch deck.
The founding statutes are drafted and with Swiss counsel; the association is in formation, and registration in the commercial register follows the founding assembly. Until counsel signs, the statutes are a draft — but their substance is decided, and this is it, summarized honestly.
Legal form and purpose
Verein Rendlio is an association under Art. 60 et seq. of the Swiss Civil Code that runs a commercial enterprise and is accordingly to be entered in the commercial register (registration in progress). Its purpose is the development, maintenance, publication, and licensing of the Rendlio software family — including publishing the source under BUSL-1.1 with staged transition to Apache-2.0, and selling commercial licences worldwide through a merchant of record (Paddle).
No profit to members — ever
The statutes exclude distributions to members in any form. Surpluses are used exclusively for the association's purpose or donated to tax-exempt charitable organisations — that is the mechanism behind the 100%-of-profits commitment: profits beyond what operating the product requires are given away, and there is no shareholder they could legally go to instead. Even on dissolution, remaining assets must go to tax-exempt Swiss organisations with a similar purpose, notably the promotion of free and open-source software — never to members.
Bodies
The general assembly of members is the supreme body; a board of one to five members runs day-to-day operations and serves in an honorary capacity (expenses reimbursed, no profit participation). Auditors are appointed when the law requires it. The draft statutes provide for a founding president who chairs the board, with safeguards designed to keep the mission stable — statute changes require a three-quarters supermajority of all voting members.
Volunteers and membership
Rendlio is built with a volunteer team, and one clause matters to every contributor: working on the project — code, docs, infrastructure, community — does not by itself create membership or any claim on the association. Membership is granted by an explicit board decision. This keeps contribution generous and governance deliberate, and it protects contributors from ever being presumed to owe the association anything either.
Provenance, disclosed
Development of the engine is substantially AI-assisted under a documented internal provenance policy, with a clean-room rule prohibiting contributor contact with competing products' source code. We disclose this openly on the product pages and in the EULA, and the engineering practices — deterministic builds, signed releases, the compatibility report — are designed to make the output verifiable regardless of how it was written.
04Contact · one address per subject
Talk to a person.
No ticket portal, no chatbot. Mail the address that matches your subject and a human answers.
- Generalhello@rendlio.com — anything, including press and partnership questions
- Supportsupport@rendlio.com — product support for licence holders and trialists
- Securitysecurity@rendlio.com — vulnerability reports; responsible disclosure appreciated
- Billingbilling@rendlio.com — purchases, invoices, refunds, licence re-issues
Rendlio Association (Verein Rendlio) · Aarau, Switzerland