Manual 0.8.0

What you may do with Revetly

Who this is for: whoever decides whether this may be run here — before it is run on real work. You need: nothing but the LICENSE file that shipped with your copy; revetly doctor says where it is on your transport. Not here: the key itself as a technical surface (there is none to configure today) and any commitment about pricing.

Revetly is source-available, not open source. The licence is the Business Source License 1.1 (BUSL-1.1), and the text you are bound by is the LICENSE file that shipped with your copy — in the repository root, at /engine/LICENSE inside the image, and in the release folder beside the tarballs. revetly doctor prints which licence the engine is under and where its text is on your transport, offline and billing nothing.

This page is the Licensor's own reading of that licence: where the line falls, in the words a reader can act on. Where this page and LICENSE differ, LICENSE governs — this is interpretation, not a second set of terms.

The Licensor is SMG Digital Services sp. z o.o., and the address for everything below is contact@smgdigitalservices.com.

The shape of it in four lines


Non-production use	Free, unlimited, no key, no registration, no notice to anyone.
Production use	Requires a licence key issued by the Licensor, under a commercial licence.
After the Change Date	That version becomes Apache 2.0, for everyone, forever. Four years per release.
Modifying, forking, reading	All allowed under the licence — the restriction is on production use, not on the source.

Running with no provider is a separate question from this one

Declaring [llm] provider = "none" and [embedding] provider = "none" together is a lite instance: no vendor is ever called, so it runs with no provider account and no key of its own. That is a fact about what the engine spends with a provider, and it answers a different question than the one this page answers. The four lines above still hold exactly as they do for a full instance — a lite instance evaluating your own repository needs no key from either side; a lite instance holding the product memory a business runs its work against is production use, and needs a licence key the same as a full one would.

What counts as production use

Production use is using Revetly in the course of, or in support of, the business operations of an organisation. If a Revetly instance is holding the product memory that people are doing paid work against, that is production use, whoever is running the container and wherever it runs.

What is not production use, and needs no key:

Evaluating it — including on your own real repository, for as long as you are deciding.
Development, testing, CI, and running it against a staging or scratch corpus.
Personal projects, research, teaching, conference demos, and writing about it.
Building a connector or a write adapter against it, and proving that extension in your own test suite.

There is no size, seat or revenue threshold in this. A one-person company using Revetly to run its actual product backlog is production use; a large company whose staff are still deciding whether to adopt it is not.

Internal use is not a managed service

Running Revetly for your own organisation — including for every team, subsidiary and affiliate under common control — is ordinary production use. Your commercial licence covers it. Nothing here asks you to buy a licence per team, and nothing here treats an internal platform group standing the engine up for internal users as though it were reselling it.

Operating instances for a third party is commercial use, and it is the case this paragraph exists for. A consultancy that runs Revetly on behalf of a client, a platform that offers it to its own customers, an agency that stands up an instance as part of a delivery, a hosting provider offering "Revetly, managed" — all of them are making production use of the Licensed Work in support of somebody else's business operations, and all of them need a licence that says so. That is a commercial arrangement to be had, not a boundary to be argued about: the terms for operating instances for others exist, and the answer to "can we do this for our clients" is normally yes, priced.

What a licence key is for

The key is a compliance artifact. It exists so that an organisation can answer "are we licensed to run this, and until when?" from the software itself, which is the question a security review, a procurement checklist or an audit asks — and answering it with an email thread is what customers called does not work.

Three claims it deliberately does not make:

Not a lock. The engine ships as readable Python in an image. A key check is a few lines of code and anyone can delete it. Deleting it grants nothing: the Additional Use Grant conditions production use on holding a valid key, so production use without one falls outside the grant and is unlicensed use. The enforcement here is legal, and the software is honest about that.
No telemetry. The key is verified offline — a signed token, checked against a public key inside the engine, with no network call on any path. The Licensor learns nothing about when or where you run it. That is the same posture the rest of the engine has about what leaves your instance.
Not a gate on your data. No licence state makes an existing corpus unreadable, stops an ingest, or degrades a read. An expired key is reported; it never holds your product memory hostage.

As of the release you are holding, no engine code reads a key yet — the verification path is a separate piece of work. The grant is not waiting on it: production use requires a key from the day the licence says so, and the engine reading one changes how you prove compliance, not whether you have it. Ask for a key at the address above.

Each version converts on a Change Date of its own

Four years after a version is first published, that version — exactly that one — becomes available under the Apache License, Version 2.0, and everything above stops applying to it. A release cut later carries a later Change Date, so the version you are running today is never the one that has already converted.

Version	First published	Converts to Apache 2.0 on
0.2.1	2026-08-13	2030-08-13
0.3.0	2026-08-26	2030-08-26
0.4.0	2026-09-07	2030-09-07
0.5.0	2026-09-21	2030-09-21
0.6.0	2026-10-06	2030-10-06
0.7.0	2026-10-08	2030-10-08
0.8.0	2026-10-13	2030-10-13

Builds before 0.2.1 carried no licence file at all. They went to named recipients under a direct arrangement, are not published under this licence, and are not the copies to rely on — take 0.2.1 or later, which states its terms.

The name is not part of the grant

Neither the licence nor the Change License conveys any right in the name Revetly, the Licensor's name, or any logo or mark of either. You may say your software works with Revetly, is built against its connector contract, or extends it. You may not call your fork or your service Revetly, and Apache 2.0 after the Change Date does not change that — its section 6 excludes trademarks for exactly this reason.

Third-party dependencies

The engine redistributes the Python distributions it runs on. Their licences — and the NOTICE content the Apache-2.0 ones oblige a redistributor to propagate — are reproduced whole in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES, beside LICENSE on every transport. That file is generated from what the environment actually resolved, so it cannot quietly describe an older dependency set than the one shipping.

Nothing in Revetly's licence takes anything away from what those grant you.

Contributing

Contributions are not being accepted yet, and that is a deliberate position rather than an oversight — see CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository. Bug reports, questions and connector work in your own repository are all welcome at the address above.

Asking

One address for all of it — a licence key, terms for operating instances on behalf of clients, an arrangement that is not on this page, or a question about whether what you are doing needs a key at all:

contact@smgdigitalservices.com

Asking costs nothing and the answer is usually shorter than the question.