Licensing and pricing
Bloodraven is source-available, not open source. The full source is public, you can read it, build it, modify it, and contribute to it. Running it in production at a commercial company requires a one-time license.
We are deliberate about that wording. Bloodraven is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1, which is not an OSI-approved open source license, so we do not call it one.
Do I need to pay?
| You are | Production use | Price |
|---|---|---|
| An individual, for personal or non-commercial use | Free | $0 |
| A student, researcher, or educator, non-commercially | Free | $0 |
| A non-profit or charity | Free | $0 |
| A company under $1M annual revenue | Free | $0 |
| Anyone, for dev / test / staging / CI / evaluation | Free forever, any scale | $0 |
| A company over $1M annual revenue, running production | Licensed | see below |
If you are not sure, email licensing@shipstream.io and ask. The answer is free and we will put it in writing.
Pricing
One-time charges. No subscription required.
| Edition | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Community | Free | Everything above. No key, no signup, no expiry. |
| Production | $990 per failover group | Production use of one failover group, perpetual, plus 12 months of updates. |
| Organization | $4,900 | Unlimited failover groups across your company, perpetual, plus 12 months of updates. |
Renewing updates after the first 12 months is optional:
| Renewal | Price |
|---|---|
| Production, per failover group | $390 / year |
| Organization | $1,900 / year |
Your license never expires. If you stop renewing, you keep the perpetual right to run every version published while your update period was active. You just stop receiving new ones until you renew.
A failover group is one MySQLFailoverGroup resource, however many sites,
replicas, or read-only instances it contains. Two sites is still one failover
group. The Organization edition is usually cheaper at five or more.
Optional, sold separately:
| Add-on | Price | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Priority Triage | $6,000 / year | Named email channel, best-effort response during US business hours, priority issue triage, roadmap input. No SLA, no on-call, no emergency incident response. |
Full commercial terms · 30-day refund, no questions asked.
What you are actually buying
Bloodraven is not a support contract with software attached. It is the reverse.
What is included, for everyone, free:
- Every page of these docs, including the runbooks, the failure mode matrix, and the known limitations we publish up front.
- The playground, which reproduces the full two-site topology and every chaos scenario locally.
- Published results from the deterministic simulation and chaos suites.
- Bug reports on GitHub, from licensees and non-licensees alike.
What is not included at any price except Priority Triage: technical support, an SLA, on-call coverage, emergency incident response, installation help, consulting, or guaranteed feature delivery. See commercial terms §6.
We would rather write documentation once than answer the same question fifty times, and we price accordingly. If you need a vendor to call at 3am, buy a managed database service instead — that is a legitimate choice and Bloodraven is not trying to replace it.
How buying works
Licenses are sold through Polar, which is the merchant of record. Polar handles VAT and sales tax worldwide and issues a proper invoice for expense reports and procurement.
You get a license key by email at checkout. You do not need it to run Bloodraven. There is no activation, no license server, no feature gating, and no phone-home. The software is fully functional without a key and always will be. Your receipt is the license, and compliance is on the honor system.
The key exists only so you have something concrete to file: an artifact for your own procurement records, expense report, and internal software inventory.
spec.license field will let you record the key in the failover
group so the operator can verify it offline — no network calls — and log
your organization, edition, and update-period expiry at startup, plus expose
them as Prometheus metric labels. This is for your own compliance auditing. It
will never gate functionality or change operator behavior. Not yet implemented;
until then, the emailed receipt is the whole mechanism.Why source-available and not Apache 2.0
Two reasons, and we would rather state them plainly than let you guess.
We want you to be able to audit this. Bloodraven automatically promotes production databases and fences nodes it believes are unsafe. You should not run software like that on trust. Every promotion decision, every fencing path, and every split-brain guard is in the repository for you to read before you deploy it.
We want it to still exist in five years. Bloodraven is maintained by ShipStream, which runs it in production for its own warehouse management system. Licensing revenue is what justifies the maintenance time. A free-with-paid-support model would push us toward selling support, which we do not want to sell and you probably do not want to buy.
What happens if ShipStream stops maintaining Bloodraven
Every version converts to the Apache License 2.0 two years after it is published. This is written into the license as the Change Date — it is automatic and we cannot revoke it.
In practice: the version you are running today becomes fully open source, forever, in two years, no matter what happens to us. If ShipStream disappears, the project does not become unusable and you are not locked out of code you depend on.
Two years is shorter than the four-year maximum the license allows, and shorter than what most BSL projects choose. That is intentional.
Contributing
Pull requests are welcome from everyone, licensed or not. First-time contributors sign a CLA, which is a license grant rather than a copyright assignment — you keep the copyright in your own work. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Common questions
Can I fork it? Yes. The license permits copying, modification, and derivative works. What it does not permit is offering Bloodraven, or a substantially similar derivative, to third parties as a hosted or managed service.
Can I run it for my own SaaS product's databases? Yes, with a license. That is ordinary internal production use. What you cannot do is resell Bloodraven itself, or offer managed MySQL to third parties with it.
Do staging and DR sites need separate licenses? Staging, dev, test, CI, and evaluation are free at any scale. A standby or DR site within a production failover group is already covered by that group's license — a two-site production group is one license, not two.
We are over $1M revenue but only use it for internal tooling. That is still production use if it serves a live system. It is one failover group, so $990.
What if we grow past $1M mid-year? Buy a license when you cross the threshold. We are not going to audit you.
Do you offer volume, multi-year, or PO billing? Yes. Email licensing@shipstream.io.
Can we get a signed agreement, a W-9, or a security questionnaire completed? Yes, for Organization purchases. Email licensing@shipstream.io before buying.
Is there a trial? The free tier is the trial and it has no time limit. Run it in staging as long as you want. There is also a 30-day refund on any purchase.
Questions this page does not answer: licensing@shipstream.io