Licensing
Flow is dual-licensed, which is a little unusual, so here's the plain-language version instead of pointing at legal text and hoping for the best.
Why two licenses in the first place
Almost everything most people actually do with Flow, running one bot and its companion site, self-hosting for a client, running a handful of these as an agency, is completely free and stays that way. But a few features on the roadmap aren't really about running one bot anymore. They're about running Flow itself as infrastructure: managing a whole fleet of servers, keeping automated backups across all of them, getting alerted the moment something breaks, spinning up preview environments on demand. That's ongoing, expensive engineering work to build and keep working, not a feature you ship once and forget.
So Flow draws a line: the core stays free forever, and those bigger infrastructure features fund themselves through Premium instead, see Premium and billing. Everything below is just the legal shape of that same line.
Everything today: AGPL-3.0
Every feature that exists right now, node management, Git integration, builds and runtimes, the reverse proxy, the bot and site pairing, Discord tooling, deploy controls, the in-browser terminal, schedules, environment variables, orgs and teams, monitoring, and the installer itself, is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, and stays that way. Nothing that's free today gets moved behind a paywall later.
What's next: a source-available license
The infrastructure-scale features mentioned above, preview environments for pull requests, volume backups, patch tracking, alerting, and fleet-scale multi-node management, ship under the Functional Source License instead (FSL-1.1-ALv2). In plain terms, that means:
- You can read, use, modify, and self-host that code for free, for basically any purpose, including running it for clients as an agency, which is exactly the audience Flow is built for.
- The only thing it actually blocks is a competing use: taking that code and using it to build or sell something that substitutes for Flow itself, or for a paid offering Flow provides using that code.
- Two years after each release, that release automatically converts to the fully permissive Apache License 2.0. It doesn't stay restricted forever, it's a waiting period, not a wall.
Where the line actually is
In the repo, this is drawn at the file level: code living under a premium/ directory (for example apps/web/src/premium/ or agent/internal/premium/) is FSL-licensed, everything outside those directories is AGPL-3.0. No existing code is being moved into premium/retroactively, this boundary only applies to new features built going forward. If it's ever unclear which applies to a given file, AGPL-3.0 is the default.
How premium features actually get unlocked
That covers why the split exists. Actually paying to unlock those features works day to day is a separate, much simpler story, covered on its own page, see Premium and billing.