Business Source License 1.1
BSL 1.1, in plain language.
The people we most want using DBX are companies embedding it in their product. The license is written for that. This page is a reading aid — the LICENSE file is the contract.
You may
- Self-host DBX for production, personal, or commercial use.
- Embed it inside your own SaaS — each of your customers getting a tenant.
- Modify it, build on it, and run it on your hardware or your customer’s.
- Rely on the conversion to Apache 2.0 after four years. Adopting DBX is not a permanent bet on us.
You may not
- Offer DBX itself as a managed service to third parties without a commercial agreement.
- Resell hosted DBX as the product — “DBX-as-a-service” — under this license.
- Treat this page as a substitute for the license text if you are doing something unusual.
The additional use grant
Business Source License 1.1 lets you use, copy, modify, and redistribute the code, subject to an additional use grant. For DBX, that grant is: free to self-host, including inside your own commercial SaaS. The restricted case is offering DBX as a managed database to third parties.
That split matches the product. The natural billable unit is the tenant, which is how our customers bill their customers. We charge when you are in our business, not when you are in yours.
Change date
The license converts to Apache License 2.0 four years after each version’s change date. After that, the additional use grant no longer applies to that version — Apache 2.0 does.
Commercial license
If you want to run DBX as a managed service for other companies, talk to us. That is a commercial deal, not a gray area.
