Licensing RepoAccess

If you run RepoAccess unmodified to sell access to your own repositories, this page is not about you

RepoAccess Core is dual-licensed: you may take it under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0-or-later, or under a commercial license. The AGPL is the default and needs no permission from anyone.

Running RepoAccess unmodified to sell access to your own repositories is the intended use, and it asks nothing extra of you - the source is already public. The AGPL covers the RepoAccess source itself. It does not reach your repositories, your customers’ data, or your business.

If that describes you, you can stop here.

What the AGPL actually asks

Two consequences matter in practice.

If you modify RepoAccess and let others interact with your modified version over a network, you must offer those users the complete corresponding source of your version, free of charge and prominently. That is section 13, the network clause. Publishing your fork and linking to it from the running service is the normal way to satisfy it. Note what this catches: your buyers use the claim page, so a modified deployment is a modified version they interact with.

Combining RepoAccess with your own code generally makes the combined work subject to the AGPL, and offering that combined work over a network would owe its source to your users on the same terms.

If either of those is a problem: that is what Pro is

The commercial license is delivered as RepoAccess Pro. Under it, Core is licensed to you on the Pro terms and not under the AGPL, so no AGPL obligation attaches to your use of it - the network clause included.

Pro lets you run it closed-source, modify it and keep your modifications private, and operate commercially without limit: no cap on revenue, customers, repositories, deployments or developers. It also adds the Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, Razorpay and Telegram Stars adapters, the embeddable service, and support. $129 once, with twelve months of updates.

So the common case has a self-serve answer. You do not need to write to anybody: if copyleft is in your way, Pro removes it.

The one case Pro does not cover: shipping the code to other people

Pro is a license to run the software. It is not a license to redistribute it. Under Pro you may not distribute, publish, sell, or sublicense the software or its source to a third party, modified or not, and you may not offer a hosted service whose main purpose is managing access to other people’s repositories. Running it for your own repositories, under your own brand, for your own customers, is expressly permitted and unaffected.

That leaves one real situation uncovered. If you sell a codebase - a boilerplate, a starter kit, a template - and you want RepoAccess inside the code your buyers receive, neither license fits. The AGPL allows it but makes your buyers’ combined work AGPL too. Pro forbids it outright.

The same clause catches a case that looks different and is not: deploying Pro into a client’s own Cloudflare account, under your licence. Agreement §2(a) covers infrastructure operated on your behalf, and a client’s account is not that; §1 defines Your Products as systems you operate for your own account; and §4(a) covers making a copy available to a third party at all. The simplest answer is usually that the client holds the licence. Where that does not fit, write.

There is an answer, it is just not on a price list. Redistribution terms exist and are agreed per case, because the cases differ: shipping inside a product sold to thousands is not the same as one agency embedding it for one client.

Which one you need

Your situationWhat you need
Running it unmodified for your own salesNothing. AGPL, as published.
Modified deployment, willing to publish your forkNothing. AGPL, network clause satisfied by publishing.
Modified or closed-source deployment, fork stays privatePro, $129
Company policy forbids AGPLPro, $129 - under Pro the code is not AGPL-licensed to you
You need a payment provider other than StripePro, $129
Shipping RepoAccess inside code your customers receiveWrite to me
Deploying it in a client’s own account, under your licenceWrite to me
Hosting repo access as a service for other people’s repositoriesWrite to me

Getting in touch

For the last three rows, write to hello@edgekits.dev with three things:

  1. What you are building, in a sentence or two.
  2. Whether your customers receive the code, or only use a service you run.
  3. Roughly how many of them.

That is enough to answer with something concrete. The reply comes from me, not from a sales process.

Honest note

I am a developer, not a lawyer, and nothing here is legal advice. This page is a summary. The operative terms are those of the AGPL-3.0 text and, for Pro licensees, of the Pro license agreement. Where they and this page disagree, they govern. If your situation is unusual, take advice on it.

Licensing in the repository · RepoAccess Core on GitHub

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