Licensing

Licensing

EZ-Kea is source-available under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0: free for noncommercial use, with commercial use requiring a paid license. This page describes exactly what that means so there are no surprises after you've deployed it.

The short version: every feature is free and unlimited for noncommercial use, and licensing never blocks anything. If EZ-Kea runs DHCP for a business, you need a commercial license.

Free for noncommercial use

Every feature, no limits, no time bomb. There is no lease ceiling, no feature gating, and no trial period. HA, IPv6, 2FA, reservations, and the rest are all simply included.

Noncommercial use covers:

• Homelabs and personal networks
• Hobby projects, learning, and experimentation
• Charitable organizations, educational institutions, public research organizations, public safety and health organizations, environmental protection organizations, and government institutions — regardless of how they're funded

That last group is the license's own wording, not a concession bolted on top. Read the LICENSE for the authoritative terms; this page is orientation, not a substitute for it.

When you need a commercial license

If EZ-Kea manages DHCP in or for a business, or you're paid to operate it for someone else, that's commercial use and it needs a license. Company size doesn't matter — a solo consultant and a large enterprise are both commercial.

Email sales@ezkea.com.

If you're genuinely unsure which side of the line you're on, ask. Better to have the conversation than to guess.

Nothing is ever blocked

This is worth stating plainly, because EZ-Kea's earlier licensing model worked differently and older write-ups may still describe it.

EZ-Kea never blocks, degrades, expires, or gates anything based on licensing. There is no grace period, no write lock, and no lease limit. An unlicensed installation is fully functional indefinitely — including one that ought to be paying.

That's deliberate. Any such check would run on your machine against source you can read and edit, so it would stop nobody who intended to bypass it, while risking locking a legitimate administrator out of their own DHCP configuration at the worst possible moment. Compliance rests on the license terms, where it belongs.

What you do see when no commercial license is installed:

• A quiet one-line note in the page footer.
• Above 100 active leases, an additional informational banner — a rough heuristic for "this install is probably not somebody's homelab". Nothing is gated on that number; it only decides how loudly licensing gets mentioned.

Both are reminders. Neither changes what EZ-Kea will do for you.

Buying a license

Email sales@ezkea.com. You'll get a license key to paste into the application.

A key encodes a licensee and an expiry date. Keys look like:

EZK1.<base64url-payload>.<base64url-signature>

They're RSA-2048 signed, so they validate offline — EZ-Kea never phones home, and there's no license server to be unavailable when you need it.

Entering a key

Admin → Licensing, paste the key, save. The page then shows the licensee, expiry date, and days remaining. Only admin accounts can reach this page.

Expired keys

An expired key is treated as no key: the footer note comes back, and nothing stops working. Renewing is a billing conversation, not an outage.

Source and redistribution

The source is published under PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — see LICENSE. You may read it, modify it, and redistribute it for any noncommercial purpose, and you must pass the license terms along with any copy you distribute.

Note that this is not an OSI-approved open-source license, and EZ-Kea shouldn't be described as open source. It's source-available: you get the code and the right to use and change it, with commercial use reserved.

Pull requests aren't being accepted, since merged code would need a separate licensing arrangement with each contributor. Bug reports and feature requests via Issues are very welcome.