Commercial licence

FoxSDR is free for noncommercial use. This page describes the terms for using it in a business. The noncommercial licence is here.

FoxSDR is free — permanently — for noncommercial use under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. If you are a hobbyist, that is the end of the matter: there is nothing to buy, nothing to register, no key, no trial period, and no feature is held back from you.

Any commercial use requires a separate paid licence. That is where this project earns its keep.

Which one applies to me?

You are covered by the free noncommercial licence if you are:

• an individual using it for a hobby, personal study, experimentation or

private entertainment;

• an amateur radio operator, SWL or enthusiast;
• a charity, school, university, public research body, public safety or

health organisation, environmental organisation, or government institution (regardless of how you are funded).

You need a commercial licence if you are, for example:

• using it in the course of a business, including purely internally;
• selling it, or selling a product or device that includes it;
• bundling it with hardware you sell;
• using it to deliver a paid service to customers;
• building a product derived from it that you intend to sell.

If you are unsure, ask. Genuine hobby use is meant to be free, and asking costs nothing. We would far rather answer a question than have anyone quietly overstep.

Evaluation

Any company may evaluate FoxSDR commercially, free of charge, for 60 days, for the purpose of deciding whether to license it. Email the address below and say so — a one-line reply confirming your evaluation window is all it takes. Evaluation does not cover shipping anything to your own customers.

Licence tiers

All commercial licences are annual. Each includes every update released during your licence term, and email support.

| Tier | Who it is for | Price | | --- | --- | --- | | Internal Business Use | A company using FoxSDR in its own work — test and measurement, spectrum monitoring, EMC, security research, engineering. Licensed per named user. | £295 per seat per year<br>£245 per seat at 10+ seats<br>50+ seats: contact us | | Service Delivery | Using FoxSDR to deliver a paid service to your customers — monitoring, surveying, consultancy. Licensed per named user. | £595 per seat per year | | OEM / Bundled | You ship FoxSDR with hardware you sell, or preinstalled on a device. | From £6,000 per year,<br>or a per-unit royalty from £8/unit | | Redistribution / Derived Product | You build and sell a product based on FoxSDR, or redistribute it commercially under your own name. | From £12,000 per year |

*Prices are in GBP and exclude VAT. Rates for the OEM and Redistribution tiers depend on volume and on what you are actually building — the figures above are the starting point for a conversation, not a rate card.*

What a commercial licence gives you

• The right to use, modify and distribute the software commercially, within the

scope of the tier you hold.

• All updates released during your licence term.
• Email support, with a target first response of two working days.
• For OEM and Redistribution licensees: input into the roadmap, and reasonable

notice before anything that would break a shipped integration.

What happens if I stop paying?

You keep what you already had. On non-renewal, your right to use and — for the OEM and Redistribution tiers — to keep distributing the versions you received during your paid term continues perpetually. You simply stop receiving new versions and support.

This matters if you ship hardware: you cannot recall units already in customers' hands, so a licence that evaporates on non-renewal would be one no manufacturer could reasonably sign. Ours does not.

Can I modify it?

Yes, under either licence. The noncommercial licence expressly permits changes and new works — but a modified version is still bound by the same terms, so it remains noncommercial-only unless you hold a commercial licence. You must also pass on the licence terms and the Required Notice: line to anyone you give a copy to.

How to buy

Email <[email protected]> with:

• who you are, and the legal entity that will hold the licence;
• what you want to build or do with it;
• roughly how many users, seats or units;
• whether you intend to redistribute.

You will get back a completed copy of COMMERCIAL-AGREEMENT.md — the actual terms — and an invoice. Nothing is hidden behind a sales process.

Notes

• Third-party components bundled with this software (Dear ImGui, GLFW,

PortAudio, nlohmann/json, pffft, SoapySDR) remain under their own permissive licences and are unaffected by the terms above. They may be used commercially in their own right; see installer/THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.txt, which is also installed alongside the application.

• The plugin interface (src/core/plugin_abi.h) is MIT-licensed on

purpose, so anyone — including commercial vendors — can write plugins for this application without needing a licence from us.

• Plugins are not covered by this licence. Each plugin carries its own

terms, stated in the plugin catalogue and displayed in the application before installation.

• We do not police hobbyists. There is no activation and no licence

check in the application, and nothing reports who you are or what you use it for. The anonymous usage report described in the privacy notice counts launches, modes and plugins, carries no identity, and can be switched off. The commercial tiers work on self-certification, the same way every source-available business does.

Contact

Steven Fairclough — <[email protected]>
Anything that is not a licensing question: <[email protected]>