Commercial use

Smeldr is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL).

What this means for you

Individual developers, open source projects, and companies building their own sites with Smeldr: AGPL imposes no meaningful restriction. You can use, modify, and deploy Smeldr freely.

Organisations providing a hosted service to others using Smeldr: AGPL requires you to release your modifications under the same license. If this is a constraint, a commercial license is available — see below.

Future commercial license

When a hosted offering ("Smeldr Cloud") becomes available, a commercial license will be available for organisations that want to use Smeldr as the basis of a hosted service without the AGPL obligation.

This will never affect the open source core. The AGPL-licensed framework you use today will remain AGPL forever.

Contributor License Agreement

Contributors are asked to sign a simple CLA before their first pull request is merged. This grants Peter Ravn Thers the right to include your contributions in commercial offerings and to issue commercial license exemptions.

The CLA is handled automatically via cla-assistant.io when you open a PR.

Questions

If you have questions about commercial use, licensing, or the CLA, email contact@smeldr.dev or open an issue tagged licensing.

Frequently asked questions

May I use Smeldr for my personal or my company's own website?
Yes. No restriction. AGPL imposes no obligation when you are running Smeldr for yourself or your own organisation. Use it freely.

May my agency build client websites with Smeldr?
Yes, if each client runs their own Smeldr instance. The AGPL obligation (to release modifications under the same license) rests with whoever operates the network service — if the client is the operator, the obligation is theirs. If you are hosting the site on behalf of the client, the same network-service rule applies to you (see below).

May I offer Smeldr as a hosted service to my customers?
Under AGPL, providing Smeldr's functionality over a network to third parties counts as distribution. You must release your modifications under AGPL. If you want to offer a hosted service without that obligation, a commercial license is available — see "Future commercial license" above.

May I build a SaaS product on top of Smeldr?
Same rule as hosted services. If your SaaS exposes Smeldr's CMS functionality to third parties over a network, AGPL applies. A commercial license removes that obligation.

What counts as a "networked service" under AGPL?
Allowing third parties to interact with Smeldr's functionality over a network (HTTP, API, MCP) — even without distributing the binary. Running Smeldr for your own organisation (employees, contractors) does not trigger this.

When will the commercial license be available?
With Smeldr Cloud (Phase 3). No date is set. If you need a commercial license before then, contact us directly — see below.

How do I contact you about licensing?
Email contact@smeldr.dev. For non-urgent questions, open an issue tagged licensing.