Infrastructure that belongs to you.
We built Vessl because we kept seeing the same pattern: a tool starts free, gains traction, then slowly walls off its best features behind enterprise plans. The moment a self-hosting tool needs a licence key to use SSL, something has gone wrong.
Vessl is MIT-licensed. Not "source-available". Not "fair-code". MIT. You can read it, fork it, patch it, and run it commercially without asking us. That constraint is intentional — it means we can't quietly change our minds later.
What we commit to.
Not just promises — these are structural constraints.
- Every feature ships in the open-source daemon.
Traefik routing, S3 backups, canvas view, AI settings, cron jobs — all of it is in the public repo. We don't maintain a secret pro tier that does more. If we build it, you get it.
- MIT license, no exceptions.
We chose MIT deliberately. Apache 2.0 has patent clauses that make commercial redistribution complicated. MIT is the plainest, broadest grant we can give. If you want to wrap Vessl in a product and sell it, you can. We'd appreciate a mention, not a cheque.
- No paywalled stability.
We don't release a buggy community edition while shipping a polished enterprise build. The daemon you download is the only daemon we maintain. Bug fixes go in; everyone gets them.
- These rules are public and permanent.
This page is version-controlled. If our philosophy ever changes, the git history will show it. We don't expect it to — but the audit trail is there if you want it.
How we keep the lights on.
Free software still has servers to pay for.
Vessl Cloud. The daemon is free. The fleet control plane — Yamux tunnel handshake, usage metering, billing alerts, team management — is what we charge for. You get everything the daemon offers; the Cloud plan is for teams who want centralized visibility across many servers.
GitHub Sponsors. If Vessl saves you money on Heroku or Railway, consider sponsoring. Individual contributions fund the engineering time that keeps the daemon healthy.
We don't take VC money. External funding always comes with growth pressure, and growth pressure eventually cracks open-source commitments. We'd rather grow slower and stay independent.
Where we stand today.
We publish these numbers because transparency is part of the deal.
This philosophy is not separate from the engineering. The reason the daemon is small (<30MB) is that we refuse to bundle bloat to justify a premium tier. The reason every feature is in the open-source build is that we don't want two codebases to maintain. The choices that make Vessl good to use are the same choices that make it genuinely open.
Thank you for using it — and for holding us to this.