Fair Source & Licensing

OpenHelm's licensing model and what it means for users and contributors.

The Business Source License 1.1

OpenHelm is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL 1.1). This is a Fair Source license — source code is available for inspection, most uses are free, but commercial redistribution requires a commercial license.

What You Can Do

Download, inspect, and run OpenHelm for personal and commercial use
Contribute code back to the project
Fork for non-competing purposes
Study the source to understand how it works

What Requires a Commercial License

Offering OpenHelm as a hosted/managed service to others
Building a competing product using OpenHelm's source
Redistributing OpenHelm as part of a commercial product

The Conversion Clause

Every version of OpenHelm automatically becomes Apache 2.0 (fully open source) four years after its release date. This is written into the license — not a promise, a legal guarantee.

Pricing Tiers and Licensing

Community — Free for personal use, students, non-profits, and startups under $1M revenue
Business — $19/user/month. Commercial use license, self-hosted, priority support (coming soon)
Cloud — $39/month. Managed hosting, team sharing, enterprise security (coming soon)

See the Pricing page for full details.