Licensing, answered.

The Grengin SUL keeps the software free and open-source for everyone — individuals, businesses of any size, non-profits, schools, and open-source projects — including for internal commercial use. You run Grengin in your own cloud and pay your cloud and AI providers directly.

The only things that cost money are optional and opt-in: managed hosting (Grengin Cloud), support contracts, indemnification, and the minimal metered fee on the AWS/Azure Marketplace image. A separate agreement is also required if you want to do something the SUL reserves — like offering Grengin to third parties as a hosted service, or white-labeling it.

A pure permissive license would let competitors take Grengin, host it as a rival service, and contribute nothing back. The SUL keeps the software free and source-available for actual users while reserving a few activities (hosting-for-others, white-labeling, reselling) so the project stays sustainable. It is intentionally "fair source" rather than OSI-approved open source; we use the word "open source" loosely in marketing to mean the code is fully public and self-hostable.

Copyleft ensures code sharing but doesn't prevent a competitor from running Grengin as a hosted service against us, and it can deter legitimate business users. The SUL is more permissive than AGPL for ordinary users (use it freely, including commercially, internally) while reserving the few activities that would undercut the project.

No. The software is free for everyone. Build from source and pay Grengin nothing, or deploy the Marketplace image (a minimal metered fee of ~$0.001/vCPU-hour, about $3/month on a 4-vCPU VM, billed through your own cloud account). Either way you pay your cloud and your AI providers directly.

Only in these cases:

1. You want to offer Grengin as a hosted, managed, or SaaS product to third parties.
2. You want to white-label, resell, or redistribute Grengin as part of a commercial offering.
3. You want optional commercial services — support with an SLA, managed hosting (Grengin Cloud), or indemnification.

None of these are about your size or revenue. They're about doing one of a few reserved activities, or buying an optional service.

No. There is no revenue threshold. A two-person startup and a Fortune 500 company use the same free, open-source software on the same terms.

Using Grengin internally is always free, including for revenue-generating work.

Free examples:

• A sales team using Grengin to draft outreach
• Customer support agents drafting replies
• Engineering, HR, finance, and ops productivity
• Internal documentation, analytics, and automation
• Development and staging environments

Requires a separate agreement:

• Embedding Grengin into a product you ship to customers who interact with Grengin directly
• Offering Grengin's functionality to external users as a service

Gray area? Email licensing@grengin.com — we'll help you figure it out.

Yes — for any use, including building commercial projects for clients.

Yes. Size and revenue don't matter. The software is free to use, self-host, and modify.

Yes — like everyone else. Contact sales@grengin.com if you'd like documentation for procurement, or if you want a discount on optional services.

Yes — teaching, coursework, research, student projects, and academic publications are all free, as is all other use.

Yes — like all other use.

Not without a separate agreement. You cannot:

• Offer hosted Grengin to third parties
• Provide Grengin-as-a-Service (SaaS) to external users
• Sell access to Grengin's functionality
• White-label Grengin for resale

Using Grengin internally to run a service business is fine — you just can't sell access to Grengin itself. Contact sales@grengin.com to discuss service-provider arrangements.

Yes, but:

• You must keep the same license terms
• You cannot remove license validation or identification mechanisms
• You must clearly mark it as a fork
• You cannot use it to offer a service that competes with official Grengin offerings (that's a reserved use)

Yes — freely, for your own use. If you distribute your modified version:

• Keep all license notices
• Mark it as modified
• Provide source code access
• Don't imply it's an official release

It depends.

Backend / internal (free):

• You use Grengin internally, including in revenue-generating operations
• Grengin doesn't ship to customers and customers don't use Grengin functionality directly

Embedded / redistributed (separate agreement):

• Grengin is bundled into a product you ship
• Your customers interact with Grengin directly

When in doubt, ask: licensing@grengin.com

Yes! By contributing, you agree to:

• License your code under the SUL
• Grant us the right to relicense your code (including for commercial, managed, and supported offerings)
• Sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for significant contributions

The Contributor License Agreement covers the full details.

Yes. You keep copyright to your contributions and can use your code elsewhere. The CLA grants us rights to use, modify, and relicense it.

So we can include contributions in commercial and managed offerings, relicense if needed for sustainability, and defend the project legally. This is standard for source-available projects with optional commercial offerings.

We rely on the honor system and community good faith. There's nothing to register and no usage to report for free use. If we believe someone is doing a reserved activity (like reselling Grengin as a hosted service), we may ask them to confirm.

Ask us at licensing@grengin.com before you ship. We'd much rather help you get it right up front.

Rights under the SUL terminate automatically on violation. To restore them, cease the violation, enter a separate agreement if one is required for the activity, and contact us for written reinstatement. Continued violation may result in legal action.

There are no per-seat fees and no named plans. Cost maps to how you run and support it:

• Build from source — free.
• Marketplace image (AWS/Azure) — minimal metered fee (~$0.001/vCPU-hour, ~$3/month on a 4-vCPU VM), billed through your own cloud account.
• Grengin Cloud (managed) — optional, for teams that don't want to run infrastructure; bring-your-own-keys by default; billed by Grengin.
• Support — optional contract, available for any deployment mode, priced per engagement.

See the pricing page for the full breakdown, or contact sales@grengin.com for managed-hosting and support quotes.

No, and no. You bring your own API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more) and pay each provider's published rates directly — Grengin adds zero margin. Optional test credits exist only as a convenience for trying a model you don't yet have a key for, billed at exact provider cost. They're never required, and your own keys keep working regardless of credit balance.

• Priority support with a response-time SLA
• Security patches with guaranteed timelines
• Managed hosting (Grengin Cloud)
• Deployment and clustering assistance
• Indemnification

Contact sales@grengin.com for the full enterprise license template.

Yes — and there's nothing to commit to. Explore the interactive demo without signing up, or deploy the Marketplace image (metered by the hour, no contract, shut it down anytime). Build-from-source is free forever.

Yes — annual prepayment and multi-year commitments on support and managed hosting carry discounts. Contact sales@grengin.com.

No. Multi-LLM access, SSO, department/project policies, PII detection, full audit trails, and real-time cost controls all ship in the open-source software and work fully for everyone. Paid offerings add services (support, managed hosting, indemnification) and convenience (the one-click Marketplace image, optional test credits) — not features.

No. There is one codebase, fully public on GitHub. Earlier docs implied SSO, audit logging, and PII detection were Enterprise-only; that's not accurate.

When you self-host (from source or the Marketplace image): Grengin runs as a single-tenant deployment inside your own AWS or Azure account. Conversations stay in your tenant, and with your own keys, prompts travel straight from your deployment to your AI provider. Grengin is not in the data path and never sees your prompts, completions, or logs. Any anonymous usage statistics are optional and can be disabled.

When you use Grengin Cloud (managed): the app is Grengin-hosted, so traffic flows through Grengin's infrastructure; credit-metered calls additionally route through the Rempute proxy. The "not in the data path" claim applies to self-hosting.

Self-hosted: no required network calls to Grengin. Telemetry is optional and can be fully disabled. Managed (Grengin Cloud): the service necessarily processes your traffic to operate.

Both run the same software. Moving to Grengin Cloud means letting Grengin host it for you; moving off means running it yourself again. There's no feature unlock or license key gating functionality — you keep your data and your keys either way.

Optional services (support, managed hosting) end at the end of the term. If you were self-hosting, nothing about the software changes. If you were on Grengin Cloud, you can export your data and move to self-hosting.

We believe:

• The software should be free for everyone who uses it, at any size
• Sustainable funding (optional services, managed hosting, the Marketplace meter) leads to better software
• Transparency and public source code are valuable
• A few activities — reselling Grengin as a hosted service, white-labeling it — should be reserved so the project isn't undercut

Revenue from managed hosting, support, indemnification, and the Marketplace meter funds full-time developers, security audits, documentation, community support, and infrastructure — without putting the software itself behind a paywall.

• Keep the software free and fully functional for everyone
• Keep the source public (no rug-pulls)
• Transparent development and roadmap
• Responsive to community feedback