Licensing

Licensing.

One licence across every TulaDB component: free to evaluate, source shared with your reviewers under agreement, and production use under a commercial licence.

Licence tiers

All TulaDB components are proprietary software of TulaDB Inc., distributed under the TulaDB Source-Available License — a proprietary licence, not an open-source one. Access comes in three tiers:

  • Evaluate with prebuilt distributions — from Downloads. The server installer (with tulactl and the Prometheus exporter), the SDKs, the dashboard, the Iceberg exporter, the Grafana dashboards and the container images of the developer quick setup, each signed by its release workflow. Evaluators install and evaluate against representative workloads under the licence's evaluation grant.
  • Source access — through an engagement. The native SDKs are part of the evaluation downloads (sdk). Reading the engine source — the write path, recovery, consensus — is licensed separately, under its own source-access terms and commercial arrangement.
  • Production — a signed commercial agreement. Operating on live or production traffic, or serving any third party, requires a commercial licence first.

What the evaluation grant covers

Internal, non-production use to install, run, and test the software for the purpose of evaluating it — the entire path these docs walk you through: a local stack, a lab cluster, load tests, integration experiments against representative workloads.

It also covers replayed or anonymised copies of your own payment traffic, processed in a non-production environment you control, where nothing customer-facing depends on the result. It does not cover live or production traffic, or providing a product or service to a third party.

Source access for your reviewers

A ledger vendor asking for your trust should show its work. Under a source-access engagement, your architecture and security reviewers read the write path, the recovery logic, and the consensus implementation rather than take our word for them — which is consistent with how the rest of this site argues: evidence over adjectives. Source access is a commercial tier because that review, and the code it reviews, is a large part of what you're buying.

Commercial terms

Source access and production licensing are scoped per engagement, and during the developer preview both typically begin as a design-partner conversation — a structured evaluation with commercial terms discussed alongside it.

For licensing, source access, evaluation and design-partner questions: [email protected]. We reply within one business day.

Fine print

  • The full licence text ships with every TulaDB distribution — the text there governs, not this page's summary.
  • Self-hosted web fonts on this site are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; third-party dependencies keep their own licences.
  • This page is a plain-language summary, not legal advice.