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Commercial License

Apollo Studio is offered under a dual license:

  1. Open-source: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later).
  2. Commercial: the terms described in this file.

You may choose either. If AGPL-3.0 fits your deployment, you do not need a commercial license. This document exists for teams for whom AGPL does not.

When a commercial license is required

AGPL-3.0 is a strong copyleft license. Broadly, if you modify Apollo Studio and make the result available to users over a network (for example, host it on your own domain as a product or inside a SaaS), AGPL requires you to publish your complete corresponding source code to those users, including the modifications, under AGPL-compatible terms.

You will typically need a commercial license if any of the following apply:

  • You want to embed Apollo Studio (or a derivative) in a closed-source product, desktop application, or mobile application.
  • You operate a hosted service or SaaS built on Apollo Studio and cannot or do not wish to publish your source code under AGPL-3.0.
  • You are an OEM bundling Apollo Studio with your own software.
  • You integrate Apollo Studio into a codebase that is subject to license terms incompatible with AGPL-3.0.
  • Your legal or procurement process disallows AGPL-licensed dependencies.

You do not need a commercial license for:

  • Personal use, exploration, and learning.
  • Teaching, research, and academic work that complies with AGPL.
  • Internal use inside an organization where no modified version is exposed to outside users over a network.
  • Open-source projects that are compatible with AGPL-3.0-or-later.

If you are unsure which applies to you, contact us before shipping.

What a commercial license gives you

The commercial license grants a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use, modify, and distribute Apollo Studio as part of your own products without the source disclosure obligations of AGPL-3.0. In exchange, the commercial license:

  • Requires attribution in a reasonable location (for example, an About screen or settings page).
  • Does not transfer ownership of Apollo Studio or its trademarks.
  • Does not grant the right to re-license Apollo Studio standalone.
  • Comes with a warranty disclaimer comparable to open-source norms unless you purchase an explicit support or warranty addendum.

Specific terms — pricing tiers, named-user vs. site licenses, support SLAs, escrow options — are negotiated per deal based on deployment scope.

How to obtain a commercial license

Commercial licensing is handled through direct contact. Please reach out with:

  • A short description of the product or service you are building.
  • Your expected number of end users or installations.
  • Hosting model (self-hosted, multi-tenant SaaS, on-device, mixed).
  • Any specific support, indemnification, or escrow requirements.

The contact address for commercial inquiries will be published in the project README.md and in SECURITY.md when the repository goes public. If you are reviewing this file before that date, open an issue on the repository tagged licensing and the maintainers will respond with a private channel.

Relationship to AGPL obligations

Choosing the commercial license means you do not distribute your product under AGPL-3.0. Conversely, you cannot combine the two — every deployment is either (a) AGPL-compliant with full source disclosure, or (b) covered by a valid commercial license. A single installation cannot claim both.

If you accept contributions to Apollo Studio via pull request, those contributions are licensed to the project under AGPL-3.0-or-later by default, and the maintainers reserve the right to relicense them under the commercial terms described above. This is a standard contributor license model known as inbound=AGPL, outbound=dual. A formal CLA may be introduced before the 1.0 release; until then, by opening a PR you agree to these terms.

Third-party components

Apollo Studio uses third-party libraries under their own licenses. See NOTICE.md for the canonical list and attribution text. A commercial license for Apollo Studio does not alter or override the license terms of those third-party libraries — you must still comply with them independently.