Licensing docs
The practical guide: which tier you need, how the licence file works, and what the release-date rule means for your deployment.
ALegal · licensing
Two licences. One honest fence.
Everything Rendlio ships is governed by exactly two documents: a public source licence (BUSL-1.1, converting to Apache-2.0 four years after each release) and a commercial licence per legal entity (the EULA). There is no third thing, no telemetry to enforce either, and no audit clause. Compliance is honesty-based by design.
The short version
- The source is public. The engine's source code is published under the Business Source License 1.1. Everyone may read, build, modify, and use it for development, testing, and evaluation — no conditions, no revenue test.
- Production use is free under USD 1M. Any entity whose annual revenue is below USD 1,000,000 (self-certified) may use Rendlio in production for free — under the BUSL Additional Use Grant and the matching free Community licence file. The two eligibility tests are one and the same test, by design.
- Above the threshold, you buy one licence per legal entity. Unlimited developers, servers, and environments; SaaS and OEM redistribution included on paid tiers. Perpetual per the release-date rule: builds you licensed keep working forever, renewals are optional.
- The fence: offering Rendlio's conversion functionality itself as a product to third parties — a hosted converter service, a conversion API, or an SDK for other developers — is reserved to the Enterprise tier. Your own application that merely uses Rendlio internally is never a competing offering.
- Every release becomes open source. Four years after a version is released, that version converts to Apache-2.0. This is written into the licence, not a promise.
End User Licence Agreement
The commercial licence: per-entity grant, tiers, perpetual builds, the 40% renewal, refunds, and the binding no-telemetry promise.
Founding offer terms
The validation-phase offer: USD 1,000, Professional-track rights, the GA credit, and the honest clause about what happens if the project stops.
Pricing
One flat price per legal entity. No seat counting, no server counting, no sales call. Free community tier under USD 1M revenue.
BBUSL-1.1 · the public licence parameters
The BUSL-1.1 parameters, in the open.
The Business Source License 1.1 text is used verbatim and unmodified — only four parameter fields are Rendlio's to set. They are drafted below exactly as proposed to counsel.
Licensor
Verein Rendlio (Rendlio Association), Switzerland. The association is the owner and commercial licensor of the work. (An interim licensor mechanism applies if the repository goes public before the Verein's registration completes — a counsel question tracked in the draft.)
Licensed Work
Rendlio, per released version — each release's LICENSE file names its specific version, because the four-year clock runs per release. This is standard BUSL practice (MariaDB, CockroachDB, and Sentry parameterize the same way).
Additional Use Grant — the fence, verbatim
This is the exact proposed grant text. It adds free production use for entities under USD 1M annual revenue and draws the line against competing conversion services — without ever catching your own SaaS built with the engine:
Additional Use Grant: You may make production use of the Licensed Work if your Total Annual Revenue in your most recently completed fiscal year was less than USD 1,000,000 (or the equivalent in other currencies), provided that this grant does not — regardless of revenue — permit you to offer a Competing Offering. "Total Annual Revenue" means your aggregate worldwide gross revenue from all sources. "Competing Offering" means a product or service made available to third parties, whether or not for payment, whose primary purpose or predominant value is to provide to those third parties the spreadsheet-conversion or document-rendering functionality of the Licensed Work itself, as a substitute for obtaining the Licensed Work, or a licence to it, from the Licensor. This includes, without limitation: offering the Licensed Work or a work derived from it as a hosted or managed file-conversion service; operating an API or endpoint whose principal function is converting spreadsheets to PDF or image output for third parties; and distributing the Licensed Work or a work derived from it as a component, library, or software development kit for use by third-party developers. A product or service is not a Competing Offering merely because it uses the Licensed Work internally. Offering your own application or service — including a hosted or software-as-a-service application — that uses the Licensed Work to produce, convert, or process documents as part of a broader offering whose value to your customers does not consist primarily of the Licensed Work's own functionality is permitted under this grant, subject to the revenue condition above. For the avoidance of doubt: non-production use of the Licensed Work — including development, testing, evaluation, proof-of-concept, and demonstration use — is permitted for everyone by the License itself, without regard to revenue, and nothing in this grant limits it.
Change Date
Four years from the release of each version (decided). The recommended mechanics: CI stamps a concrete date into every release's LICENSE file at build time, so every copy carries a self-contained, certain date. Counsel chooses between the stamped date and a rolling formula.
Change License
Apache License, Version 2.0 (decided at launch). Contributor IP assignments already secure the association's right to relicense on the four-year schedule without per-release contributor consent.
What is deliberately absent
No audit clause, no reporting duty, no telemetry hook. The revenue condition is self-assessed, exactly like the Community-tier self-certification; enforcement is by copyright and contract claim, not by technology. Adding surveillance to the licence would contradict the published privacy stance — so it is not there.