Licensing

Octo is open source under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPL-3.0). This page explains what that means for you in plain language.

You can run Octo in production, free of charge

Octo is meant to be used. Run it for your own projects, inside your company, for commercial work or not — there is no fee, no seat count, and no obligation that comes from simply running it. Development, CI, staging, production: all normal use.

Your flows are yours

Building integrations on Octo is using the platform, not modifying it. The flow YAML you write, the CEL expressions inside it, the resources and templates it references — that is your data and your business logic, not a derivative work of Octo. You never have to open-source your flows, and the AGPL places no requirements on them.

The same goes for the systems your flows talk to: connecting Octo to your databases, APIs, and internal services creates no licensing 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 then either distribute your modified version or run it as a service that others use over a network, you must make your modified source available under the AGPL as well. The network clause is what distinguishes the AGPL from the ordinary GPL: hosting a modified Octo for others counts as conveying it, so users of your service are entitled to the modified source.

If you run an unmodified Octo, nothing is asked of you.

Why AGPL

The license was chosen so that improvements to the platform itself stay free for everyone. Anyone can use Octo, self-host it, and build on it — but nobody can take the platform closed-source and offer it as a proprietary hosted product while the community keeps contributing improvements. Fixes and features to the engine flow back to all users.

In practice

The full license text is at github.com/juancavallotti/octo/blob/main/LICENSE.