Licensing

The licensing model, briefly

RedScribe is source-available, not OSI-approved open source: the source is public and modifiable, but the license restricts commercial use.

• Free for personal and community or noncommercial use, permanently.
• Commercial use, including running it at a for-profit consultancy, requires a commercial license.

Commercial use is free right now

As a kickstart for the community, a commercial license key is free for the first year, no payment required. Email redscribe.maintainer@proton.me for one. Priced tiers begin once RedScribe has been proven at the scale real enterprise engagements demand, and nothing about a key already issued during the free period changes retroactively once pricing starts.

Nothing is feature-gated, either way

Every RedScribe instance has every feature, whether or not anyone paid. A commercial license changes exactly one thing: a “Licensed to X” line in the app’s own footer, purely as attribution and never a technical restriction.

Activating a license key

If your organization has a commercial license, you’ll be given a license key, a signed, tamper-evident text string. Activate it from Settings → Licensing (needs the permission to manage licensing): paste the key into the field and save.

A key is checked when you save it, and an invalid or tampered one is rejected with an error. Once a valid key is saved, the page shows its details: who it’s licensed to, the licence type, when it was issued, when it expires and how many days are left, and who last changed the key.

If a saved key later stops verifying, for example because the instance’s signing public key (LICENSE_SIGNING_PUBLIC_KEY) was changed or removed, the page says License key not recognised rather than pretending no key is set, and the footer falls back to the plain, unlicensed display. Nothing is blocked either way.

What the footer shows

State	Footer	Also shown
No key entered	RedScribe v<version>	Nothing
Active (valid, not near expiry)	RedScribe v<version> — Licensed to <Org>	Nothing
Expiring soon (30 days or less left)	Same “Licensed to” line	An amber banner, shown only to whoever can manage licensing, across the whole app, saying your commercial license for <Org> expires in N days, with a Renew link
Expired	RedScribe v<version> — License expired (<Org>)	A red banner, shown the same way, saying nothing is blocked but the instance is no longer shown as licensed

Expiry never blocks anything

An expired key is still a genuinely valid, authentically signed key. It just stops being displayed as currently licensed. No feature is disabled, no workflow is blocked, and no one outside whoever manages licensing ever sees an expiry banner. This is pure attribution, consistent with the no-feature-gating policy above. If your license has expired, contact whoever issued it for a renewed key; that’s an offline process outside RedScribe itself.