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It's risky if you have any chance of ever crossing $1M in company revenue because the license will terminate as soon as you reach that and you'll have to rewrite everything.

> The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to do everything you might do with the software that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright, but only as long as you meet all the conditions below.

> You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.






To be fair, getting a platform for free that can potentially bring you to $1M is a very good deal, I'm quite sure you ll figure out a strategy before you get to $1M, and perhaps even get a good deal on the license from them. However I do think they should've been more upfront about the licensing.

1M revenue isn't that high a bar to clear in retail, just takes one popular/meme product. After all the COGS/fixed costs are tallied up, that could leave you with significantly less with which to contemplate custom development or platform changes.

I'm sure if you're lucky to get near 1 million in revenue you can reach out and pay for a license.

You are not required to rewrite everything if you exceed $1million in annual revenue. You are required to get a commercial license from them, which costs money.

That's not the same thing. And quite frankly, if you're making over $1 million in annual revenue you should be able to afford the license fee for the most important part of your company.


There's no guarantee that a commercial license will be available at a reasonable fee, or available at all. You'll have nothing to negotiate with because the alternative is to rewrite or shut down immediately.

Isn't that true of anything?

At renewal software provider X might hike license fees for Y to an unreasonable fee, or decide you're not worth the time at all.

I assume you can get a commercial license at any point, not only after you reach X revenue too?


It's true for proprietary software yes. The title of this post was "Gumroad is open source" (which has now been fixed).



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