License

Reflex is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1, the same license model HashiCorp, MongoDB, Sentry, Cockroach, and Couchbase use.

What you can do (free)

• Use it personally
• Use it commercially in your own product or service
• Read, modify, fork, and redistribute the source
• Run it on your own hardware, customer hardware, or cloud
• Embed it in proprietary products you ship to your own customers
• Use it for research, education, and open-source projects

This covers ~99% of typical use cases. If you’re a robotics startup, an academic lab, an integrator, or a hobbyist — you can use Reflex commercially with no payment, no signup, no API key.

What requires a commercial license

You can’t run Reflex as a competing hosted service that offers Reflex itself as a paid offering — for example, a “Reflex-as-a-service” cloud platform that competes with FastCrest’s own hosted offering.

This is the BSL “additional use grant” pattern. The license deliberately doesn’t restrict embedded commercial use, internal use, or any normal product integration. It only restricts a specific competitive scenario.

If you’re unsure whether your use case requires a commercial license, email us — most cases are clearly in the free bucket.

When BSL converts to Apache 2.0

The license includes an automatic conversion clause: every BSL-licensed version of Reflex becomes Apache 2.0 four years after its release date. So:

• v0.7 (released 2026-04-29) → Apache 2.0 on 2030-04-29
• v0.8 → Apache 2.0 four years after its release
• And so on

This means Reflex’s source is permanently open. The BSL window only restricts commercial competition during the active commercial window; the work itself is open to the public forever.

Why we picked BSL

Three reasons:

1. It protects the option to fund continued development. A pure Apache 2.0 release would let a hyperscaler take Reflex, host it, and sell it as a managed service — capturing all the revenue while the actual development team gets nothing. BSL prevents the specific competitive case while leaving every legitimate use free.
2. The same pattern works at scale. HashiCorp built a multi-billion-dollar business on this license. MongoDB and Sentry’s businesses were enabled by it. The pattern is well-understood by enterprise legal teams.
3. Apache 2.0 in 2030 is a real commitment. Each version we ship today is on a clock toward fully open source. We can’t quietly rug-pull this; the conversion is in the LICENSE file.

If your enterprise legal team flinches

BSL is not OSI-approved (OSI’s definition requires no restrictions on field of use). Some enterprise procurement teams have a hard “OSI only” rule and will block BSL. If that’s blocking your deployment:

1. Call us at hello@fastcrest.com — we can grant an exemption-letter for legitimate non-competing use.
2. Or wait until the auto-conversion — that release will be Apache 2.0 retroactively, and you can deploy that version freely.

For most of the industry, BSL is fine — but the friction exists, and we’d rather know about it than have you silently choose a different tool.

Commercial licensing (offering Reflex as a hosted service)

Reflex’s primary commercial business is FastCrest’s own hosted product (coming via reflex serve --pro). If you want to offer Reflex itself as a hosted service to compete with that, or embed it in a closed-source proprietary product where you specifically don’t want the BSL terms to apply, contact us:

• hello@fastcrest.com — for commercial licensing inquiries
• We typically respond within 1-2 business days

Pricing for commercial licenses is negotiable based on use case and scale. There is no published rate card.

What “source-available” means in practice

• The full source code is on GitHub: FastCrest/reflex-vla
• You can fork, study, modify, and submit pull requests
• We accept contributions under a standard CLA (contributor license agreement)
• Issues, discussions, and bug reports are welcome on GitHub
• Internal builds, custom forks, and private modifications are explicitly permitted under BSL

This is not a “the binary is on PyPI but the source is hidden” situation. The source IS the distribution.

Comparison to common alternatives

License	Restricts commercial use?	Restricts hosted offerings?	OSI-approved?
BSL 1.1 (Reflex)	No	Yes (specific competing case)	No (until auto-conversion)
Apache 2.0	No	No	Yes
MIT	No	No	Yes
AGPL	No	Forces source disclosure	Yes
Commercial / proprietary	Often	Always	No

If your use case is “deploy Reflex to my own robots, my own labs, my own customers” — BSL works just like Apache 2.0 for you. The only legal difference shows up if you want to build a competing hosted business specifically on Reflex.