Licensing
Octo is AGPL-3.0, and what that means for running it in production and contributing.
Octo is open source under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPL-3.0). In plain language:
You can run Octo in production, free of charge
Run Octo for your own projects or inside your company, commercially or not. There is no fee, no seat count, and no obligation from running it. Development, CI, staging, and production are all normal use.
Your flows are yours
Building integrations on Octo is using the platform, not modifying it. Your flow YAML, CEL expressions, resources, and templates are your business logic, not a derivative work of Octo. You never have to open-source your flows, and connecting Octo to your databases, APIs, and internal services creates no obligations for those systems.
What the AGPL asks of you
The AGPL applies to Octo itself: the runtime, the editor, the orchestrator, and the rest of the platform code. If you modify that code and distribute it or run it as a service others use over a network, you must make your modified source available under the AGPL. The network clause distinguishes the AGPL from the ordinary GPL: hosting a modified Octo for others counts as conveying it. If you run an unmodified Octo, nothing is asked of you.
Why AGPL
The license keeps improvements to the platform itself free for everyone. Anyone can use, self-host, and build on Octo, but nobody can take it closed-source and offer it as a proprietary hosted product.
In practice
| Scenario | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Run Octo in production for your company | Allowed, no obligations |
| Build private integrations and flows | Allowed, your flows stay yours |
| Modify Octo and run it as a service | Share your modifications under AGPL |
| Offer a closed-source fork as a hosted product | Not allowed |
The full license text is at github.com/juancavallotti/octo/blob/main/LICENSE.
This page is a plain-language explanation, not legal advice. When in doubt, read the license text or consult a lawyer.