Licensing Pagecraft
Two licences, because the engine and the app ask different things of you. Most people never have to think about it: if you are using pagecraft-pdf.pages.dev, or running an unchanged copy of it yourself, there is nothing on this page you need to do.
The split
One licence could not do both jobs. MIT everywhere would hand the finished product to anyone who wanted to re-skin and resell it; AGPL everywhere would make the engine untouchable by the developers it was written for.
The engine and the tools around it
MIT
Embed it in anything, including a closed-source commercial product, and keep your changes to yourself. The only obligation is to keep the copyright notice.
- What it covers
- packages/core
- packages/ai
- packages/cli
- The text
- LICENSE-MIT
The website and the app
AGPL-3.0-or-later
Run it, change it, host it — for your own organisation or commercially. If you make your changed version available to other people over a network, you have to offer those people its source.
- What it covers
- apps/web
- The text
- apps/web/LICENSE
Which licence applies to you
You are probably not here to read two licences. You are here because you want to do one specific thing and somebody has asked whether it is allowed.
I want to put the PDF engine inside my own product.
Go ahead, including in a closed-source commercial product, and including if you never tell anyone. @pagecraft/core and @pagecraft/ai are MIT, and nothing in them calls home, so embedding one does not make your product phone anywhere either.
MIT — nothing to do
I want to script the command-line tool at work.
Go ahead. The CLI is MIT like the rest of the packages. Wrapping it, shipping it inside your own tool, or building a commercial service on top of it are all fine.
MIT — nothing to do
I want to host Pagecraft myself for my company.
Go ahead, unchanged or changed. Self-hosting is a supported way to run this and always will be. If you changed it and colleagues or customers reach it over a network, offer them the source of your version — a link in the footer to your fork is enough.
AGPL — offer your source
I want to change it and use it only inside my own network.
Go ahead. The AGPL asks you to offer source to the people who use your version over a network; if those people are your own staff, that is who you offer it to. Nothing has to be published to the world.
AGPL — offer your source
I want to fork it and build something else on top.
Go ahead. Keep it under the AGPL, say what you changed, and it is yours. Forking the engine on its own is easier still, because MIT asks for nothing back.
AGPL — offer your source
I want to sell it to customers under my own brand, without publishing my changes.
That is the one case the AGPL does not cover, and the one thing this project sells. It buys you an exemption from publishing your changes to the app, and nothing else — every line it covers is already in the repository.
Commercial licence
The commercial licence
It buys a way out of one obligation. There is deliberately no better version of Pagecraft behind it: everything it covers is in the public repository, and anyone who complies with the AGPL needs nothing from us at all.
- What it covers
- Running a modified or white-labelled copy of the app without offering its source to the people who use it. It does not cover the packages, because those are MIT and need no licence from anyone.
- How long it lasts
- Annual, and it does not expire retroactively: a version you shipped while the licence was live stays licensed for that version. Stop renewing and you go back to the AGPL for anything new.
- What you still get
- The same source everybody else has, from the same public repository. There is no private branch and no separate build — a commercial customer and a stranger are reading the same code.
- What it costs
- It depends on the deployment, and it is agreed in writing before anything is signed. No number is quoted here because none would be honest for both a two-person studio and a bank.
- What it does not include
- Nothing, unless you also buy support. A licence and a support contract are separate on purpose, so that neither is a way of charging for the other.
Open an issue at github.com/amanawasthi2025/pagecraft with what you are building and how it will be deployed. You will get terms back, from a person.
What makes this offer ours to make
A dual licence only works if every contribution arrived under terms that allow it. Contributions are accepted under the licence of the directory they touch, with a Developer Certificate of Origin sign-off — which is the whole of what you agree to by sending a patch, and is written out in CONTRIBUTING.md.
And what does it cost to use?
Nothing, for everybody, for every operation, with no account and no limit. The pricing page says why that is affordable and lists the ways to pay for it if you want to.