Licensing
Yowa is released under the Yowa License: the Apache License 2.0 with a few additional conditions. The source code is public, and using Yowa inside your own organization is free, including self-hosting it for your whole team.
The main additional condition covers hosted use: offering Yowa to people outside your organization requires a commercial license. This page shows where that line falls, using the questions we hear most often. It is a plain-language guide, not legal advice. If anything here differs from the LICENSE, the LICENSE controls.
Common scenarios
| Scenario | Commercial license |
|---|---|
Your organization uses Yowa internally Self-hosted, across any number of workspaces. | Not required |
You deploy Yowa for a client, who owns it and uses it internally Implementation, training, consulting, or customization work. | Not required |
Your team uses Yowa to do work for clients, who only receive the deliverables An agency that runs its content production in Yowa and ships the finished work. | Not required |
Agents only push reports or notifications to a client’s Slack channel The client reads them but never interacts with the instance. | Not required |
You run and manage Yowa instances for clients on your own infrastructure A managed service, whether or not you charge for it. | Required |
People outside your organization sign in to your instance Clients, partners, or the public get their own accounts. | Required |
People outside your organization drive your instance through another entry point A public website backed by Yowa, a Slack integration, or an API — even when it is free. | Required |
You embed Yowa in a product you sell or distribute Yowa ships as a component of another commercial offering. | Required |
Other conditions
- Branding: keep the Yowa logo, product name, and the copyright and attribution information shown in the Yowa interface, unless we have given you a written branding waiver.
- Attribution: if you build on Yowa’s backend, daemon, or CLI without the Yowa interface, keep the copyright and NOTICE information, and state in your user-facing documentation that your product is built on Yowa, with a link to the GitHub repository.
- Forks: publishing the source code of a fork is not a hosted service and needs no commercial license. Anyone who operates a hosted service from that fork needs their own.
- A commercial license and a branding waiver are separate grants. One does not include the other.
Getting a commercial license
Tell us about your use case through Contact Sales and we’ll get back to you within three business days. Not sure whether your setup needs a license? Ask us on Discord or through the same form.