Licensing guide

Rendlio licensing has two layers, and they are deliberately independent:

1. The source licence — the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL) that governs the engine’s public source code.
2. The licence file — a small signed file, Rendlio.license, that turns off the evaluation watermark in shipped builds. It is verified fully offline; the engine never phones home.

The licensor and commercial counterparty in both layers is the Rendlio Association (Verein Rendlio), Switzerland.

Reflects counsel-review drafts

The exact BUSL parameter text — the revenue test, the competing-offering definition, and the community self-certification wording — is currently drafted for review by Swiss counsel and is not yet operative. This guide reflects those drafts. Once issued, the LICENSE file in the engine repository and the terms presented at checkout are the authoritative texts.

The source licence, in plain words

The engine’s source is published under the Business Source License 1.1 — source-available, with these parameters (draft, per the note above):

• Everyone may read, copy, modify, redistribute, and make non-production use of the code — development, testing, evaluation, proof-of-concept — without any condition on revenue.
• Production use is free under USD 1M. If your total annual revenue in your most recently completed fiscal year was under USD 1,000,000 (self-certified — nobody audits you), you may use Rendlio in production for free.
• One fence, regardless of revenue: you may not offer Rendlio itself as the product — a hosted or managed file-conversion service, an API whose principal function is converting spreadsheets for third parties, or redistribution as a component/SDK for third-party developers. Those rights are what the paid tiers sell.
• Your own SaaS is fine. An application or service that uses Rendlio internally — an invoicing product that renders PDF invoices, a reporting platform that exports workbooks — is not a competing offering. Building your own product with the engine is expressly the intended use, on the free grant (under USD 1M) and in every paid tier.
• The four-year Apache flip. Each released version carries a Change Date four years after its release. On that date, that version’s licence automatically becomes Apache 2.0 — full open source. This is written into the licence itself, not a promise that can be withdrawn later.

Above USD 1M revenue, or for the fenced-off uses (hosted conversion services, redistribution to third-party developers), you buy a commercial licence — see the tiers below.

Tiers

Licensing is per legal entity, with unlimited developers — there is no seat counting of any kind. Enterprise covers a corporate group: the licence file itself lists the covered affiliates. All paid licences are one-time purchases that include 12 months of maintenance (new builds); see perpetual fallback for what happens after.

Tier	Who it is for	List price (USD, one-time)	Availability
Community	Any entity under USD 1M annual revenue, self-certified	Free	Self-serve at launch — request
Trial	Anyone evaluating watermark-free; business email required	Free, 30 days	Self-serve at launch — request
Founding	Early supporters at launch (limited count); the fee is credited toward Professional at GA	1,000	On sale at launch
Early Access	Beta adopters	1,199	On sale during beta
Professional	One legal entity, unlimited developers, SaaS/OEM use of your own products included	1,499	Price published now; on sale at GA
Enterprise	A corporate group: named affiliates, third-party-converter/SDK redistribution right, source escrow, priority support	3,999	Price published now; on sale at GA

Maintenance renewals are one-time purchases at 40% of the then-current list price (Professional 599, Enterprise 1,599), extending maintenance_until by 12 months. Founding terms — including the credit toward Professional at GA and the fallback promises — are stated in full in the founding offer terms; the pricing page summarizes them.

Community and the source grant are one test. The community tier’s eligibility (under USD 1M, self-certified, per entity) is deliberately the same test as the BUSL production grant, with the same wording, so you can never satisfy one and fail the other.

How the licence file works

A licence is one file, recommended name Rendlio.license: a single ASCII line — a compact JWS token signed with ES256 (ECDSA P-256/SHA-256). Its claims are the whole story:

Claim	Meaning
sub	The exact legal entity name of the licensee
tier	community | trial | founding | early_access | professional | enterprise
lic	The licence id (GUID) — quoted in support and reissue workflows
maintenance_until	The date that gates which builds the licence covers (see below)
iat	Issue timestamp — drives the trial’s 30-day window
affiliates	Enterprise only: every covered legal entity, listed by name

Verified offline — no phone-home, ever

Verification is a pure signature check against public keys embedded in the binary. No activation step, no licence server, no hardware locking, no per-seat metering. Concretely, the engine never: opens a network connection for any purpose; reads hardware identifiers, hostnames, or usernames; writes licensing state anywhere; emits telemetry. The compatibility report never contains the licensee identity. This is a contractual product promise, not just an implementation detail — which is also why the licence works unchanged on air-gapped hosts.

Where to put the file

The engine resolves at most one licence source — first match wins, no merging:

1. --license <path> on the command line
2. RENDLIO_LICENSE environment variable (a file path or the licence text itself, inline)
3. Rendlio.license in the current working directory
4. ~/.rendlio/Rendlio.license (your user profile directory)
5. Nothing found → evaluation watermark mode + warning W9001

Note that even the free Community tier requires a minted file: --license community asserts the Community tier when a community licence file is present, but bare community without a minted file is invalid (exit 3). Minting is self-serve and takes a minute — request it here.

The perpetual fallback

maintenance_until does not expire your licence — it gates which builds it covers:

• A licence is valid for a build iff the build’s release date is on or before maintenance_until. Every such build is covered forever.
• A build released after maintenance_until runs in evaluation mode (warning W9006) until maintenance is renewed. Nothing you already run ever stops working.

So a Professional licence bought today runs today’s build, and every build released in the next 12 months, perpetually. Renewal only buys access to newer builds.

Trials, and what happens without a licence

• Trial licences are valid 30 days from issue (iat), measured against the system UTC clock — and nothing else. Yes, rolling the clock back extends a trial; we accept that openly, because defeating it would require hidden state, fingerprinting, or network checks, all of which violate the zero-phone-home promise.
• No licence (or an expired one) means evaluation mode: full features, identical fidelity, but every output page carries a diagonal “Rendlio Evaluation” watermark and the run emits W9001 — so watermarked conversions exit 1 at best, never 0, and pipelines notice. There is deliberately no feature-crippled tier.
• A broken licence file that was discovered (steps 3–4 above) degrades gracefully to evaluation mode (W9003); a broken licence you passed explicitly (steps 1–2) is a hard error (exit 3) — you asked for that file specifically, so silence would be wrong.

Inspecting and validating

rendlio license info               # who, which tier, maintenance date, verdict — exit 0 always
rendlio license validate acme.license   # scriptable check: exit 0 valid / 3 invalid

license info also tells you whether the current build is covered (“valid for this build” / “expired for builds after …” / “watermark mode”). Full command details: CLI reference.

Which tier am I?

Work down the list; the first match is your tier.

1. Just evaluating, developing, or testing? You need no licence at all — evaluation mode is free, unlimited, and full-featured; only the watermark differs. Want to evaluate watermark-free? Request a 30-day trial (business email required).
2. Total annual revenue under USD 1M (self-certified, per legal entity) and you are not offering conversion itself as a service to third parties? → Community, free. Mint your licence — the file is required even on the free tier.
3. One legal entity, revenue USD 1M or above, shipping your own products — including your own SaaS that uses Rendlio internally? → Professional.
4. A corporate group that needs affiliates covered, or you redistribute the engine to third-party developers (SDK, component, embedded converter), or you need source escrow and priority support? → Enterprise.
5. Want to adopt before GA? → Founding at launch (limited count, credited toward Professional at GA) or Early Access during beta. See pricing.

Unusual structure (a sub-USD-1M subsidiary of a large group, revenue vs. funding questions)? The revenue definition is one of the points explicitly under counsel review — when in doubt, ask us before self-certifying.

Next steps

• Quickstart — Get a licence — placing the licence file, in practice
• Deployment — licences in Docker, CI, and air-gapped environments
• Pricing — the tier cards, founding terms, and checkout