Licensing · Editor + SDK

License terms

PDFluent is two products. The desktop Editor is free for everyone, including commercial use. The developer SDK is published under the AGPLv3 and is complete — nothing is withheld, nothing expires. What the paid licences buy is the right not to publish your own source. Full legal text in the terms.

Editor — desktop app

Free for everyone, including commercial use

No seats, no subscription, nothing to activate — the same download for personal and business use.

SDK — developer library

AGPLv3, or a yearly commercial licence

Four self-service buttons from €999 a year. Bought in a minute, cancelled in the billing portal, no sales call either way.

Free — the AGPLv3

The default, and the complete product. The whole SDK under the AGPL, for everyone. It asks one thing back.

  • —Every feature. Nothing is withheld, nothing expires, no watermark.
  • —Use it in production, commercially, at any scale.
  • —The AGPL asks one thing back: if you convey the software or run a modified version as a network service, you offer your users the corresponding source under the same licence.

For many organisations that is fine. For some it is impossible, because the surrounding product is closed, a customer contract forbids it, or the legal department will not accept a copyleft obligation in a shipped binary. The paid buttons exist for exactly that case.

The commercial licences

Yearly, excluding VAT. Each one removes the AGPL source obligation for the use it names, and nothing else changes: same build, same features, no key, no activation.

Commercial

€999

per organisation, per year

  • Closed-source use: ship PDFluent inside your product without publishing your own source.
  • SaaS where PDF functionality is a part of your own product.
  • Unlimited developers, unlimited locations, unlimited internal projects.

OEM Startup

€2,499

per product, per year

  • Redistribution: ship PDFluent inside a product you sell to third parties.
  • Offer PDF functionality itself as a service to third parties.
  • One named product. A second product is a second licence.

OEM

€9,999

per product, per year

  • Redistribution: ship PDFluent inside a product you sell to third parties.
  • Offer PDF functionality itself as a service to third parties.
  • One named product. A second product is a second licence.

Commercial or OEM

If your customers pay you for PDF functionality that PDFluent provides — a conversion API, a PDF/A service, an OCR service, hosted PDF tooling — that is OEM, not Commercial.

Both OEM bands grant the same rights. OEM Startup is the same licence at €2,499 for organisations below €1,000,000 in revenue, declared at checkout and moving to €9,999 at the first renewal after the organisation passes it.

Priority support

€4,999 a year, on top of any paid licence: a reply within 1 working day. It is a separate subscription, so cancelling it never touches the licence.

What you receive

A Stripe order confirmation and a licence document by e-mail, naming your organisation, the button, the product where one applies, and the term. Together they are the licence. Nothing is installed, nothing is activated, and no build differs from the free one.

Why there is nothing to activate

Any check in published source can be removed in minutes by anyone holding the source, so it would only ever inconvenience the people who intended to pay. The obligation here is contractual, and it is enforceable in the ordinary way. Air-gapped deployment follows from the same fact: nothing in PDFluent contacts a server, so it needs no permission and costs nothing extra.

If the licence lapses

Nothing breaks and nothing you have shipped is affected. What ends is the right to ship further releases under these terms; from then on the AGPL applies, with its source obligation.

Bought before 6 September 2026

Licences bought before 6 September 2026 were perpetual and stay perpetual. Nothing here withdraws or replaces them, and there is nothing to migrate.

Third-party components

Several components in the repository are forks of third-party open source and stay under their own permissive licences. They are not PDFluent's to relicense and need no licence from PDFluent. NOTICE records which they are.

Which button applies to you

The prices are on the pricing page and the buttons are self-service. If you are unsure which side of the OEM rule you are on, ask before you buy.