Documentation version 0.1.0 (not released yet)

Chapter 14 of 15

Licensing and editions

Two separate things: the licence of the source code (what you may do with pgCellar), and the licence key (how many servers you may add). This chapter explains both. It is a summary: the text of the file LICENSE is what counts.

The source licence: FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0

pgCellar is released under the Functional Source License, version 1.1, with the Apache License 2.0 as its future licence (SPDX: FSL-1.1-ALv2). In plain words:

  • The source is public. You can read it, build it, modify it and redistribute it.
  • You can use it for any purpose except a Competing Use. Using it to back up your own databases, or your employer's, or your customers' as part of a professional service, is a permitted purpose. So are non-commercial education and research.
  • A Competing Use is making the software available to others in a commercial product or service that substitutes for pgCellar or offers the same or substantially similar functionality. In practice: you cannot take pgCellar and sell a hosted "backup console" service built on it.
  • Each version becomes Apache-2.0 two years after its release. After that date, that version is under a permissive licence with no such restriction.

If you are in doubt about a specific use (a managed-service offering, an integration in a product), ask before you build it: the author prefers a conversation to a surprise.

Barman is a separate program under GPL-3.0. The image contains it unmodified; pgCellar runs its command line and never imports, links or patches it. The two programs keep their own licences. The Docker image is an aggregation of them.

Editions

Edition Servers Price
Free up to 2 0
Pro up to 10 490 EUR per year
Business unlimited 1 490 EUR per year

Prices are the ones on the project page at the time of writing; see https://dbfactory.io/en/pgcellar/ for the current ones. Early access is free during the beta.

Free is not a trial. There is no expiry and no feature locked away: the Free edition simply holds two servers.

What a licence blocks, and what it never blocks

A licence never blocks a backup, a restore or a drill. That is a product rule, in the code, tested. Whatever the state of your licence:

  • scheduled and manual backups keep running;
  • restores, point-in-time recovery and downloads keep working;
  • restore drills keep running and reports keep being written;
  • alerts, the API, metrics and the console keep working.

What a licence limits is adding a server beyond the quota. The check is made in one place only, where a server is created, so the form and the API behave the same. Beyond the quota the answer is a message that says what keeps working and where to get a licence.

A server that already exists is never removed or paused because of the licence.

Expiry and grace

State Meaning Quota
free No key 2 servers
valid Signed key, not expired What the key says
grace Expired for less than 30 days Still what the key says
expired Expired for 30 days or more Free rules: 2 servers, for new additions
invalid The key does not verify Free rules, and the reason in a banner

A key is valid through the end of its expiry day (UTC). After expiry you get 30 days of grace. After that, the Free rules apply to additions only; the servers you already have keep running and nothing is deleted.

A key of edition "free" never raises the quota.

The footer of every page shows the edition and the count ("Free edition · 2 of 2 servers"). The Status page shows a banner only when you are over quota, in grace, or expired.

Putting a key in place

A key looks like PGC1.<payload>.<signature>. It is Ed25519 signed and verified offline against a public key built into the binary: no account, no network call, nothing phones home.

Put it in pgcellar.yaml:

license:
  key: "PGC1.eyJpZCI6...."

or keep it in a file and point to it:

license:
  file: /etc/pgcellar/license.key

Check what the application sees:

docker compose exec pgcellar pgcellar license show --config /etc/pgcellar/pgcellar.yaml

state:    valid
edition:  Pro
licensee: Example Ltd
id:       ...
servers:  10 allowed
expires:  2027-10-20 (grace until 2027-11-19)
footer:   Pro edition · Example Ltd · 3 of 10 servers

To read what a key says, without a configuration file:

pgcellar license verify PGC1.eyJ...

It prints the payload (id, edition, licensee, servers, issue and expiry dates), the state, and a verdict: signature OK, or INVALID with the reason. It exits with a non-zero status for an expired key.

GET /api/v1/license (viewer) returns the edition, the licensee, the servers allowed and used, the expiry and the state. The metrics pgcellar_license_servers_max and pgcellar_license_servers_used expose the quota.

pgcellar license keygen and pgcellar license issue are for the vendor: they create the signing key and sign licence keys. You never need them. The private key is never in the repository.

Get a key at https://dbfactory.io/en/pgcellar/.

Which servers are counted

Servers are counted as the Servers page lists them: the sections of barman.d, the entries of pgcellar.yaml and the servers in the status cache, each name once. pgcellar license show counts only the entries of pgcellar.yaml, so its footer line can differ from the one in the console.