Parsware Platform
Built only on permissive open source
Parsware is built only on open-source libraries whose licences cost nothing to ship, per seat, per server or per customer. That isn't a preference, it's a rule every dependency has to pass before it's added, and it's why a Parsware price can't grow behind your back. What the rule refuses, what it cost us to keep, and what we counted when we checked.
Every business platform is built on other people's software: a database, a web framework, a charting library, a data grid. Some of those are free to use and some are free only until you sell something. When a vendor's platform depends on the second kind, its customers pay for it eventually, in a price that rises per seat or per server, or in a component that has to be replaced in a hurry.
Parsware has a rule against that, and this article is about the rule and what it has cost us.
The rule
A library may go into Parsware only if it's open source under a permissive licence (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC, MPL-2.0, the PostgreSQL licence, or the SIL Open Font License for fonts) and costs nothing, ever: not per seat, not per server, not per customer, not per deployment.
The rule refuses, whatever the library is good at:
- "Free for open source, paid for commercial use." This is common in exactly the places a business platform shops: charts, data grids, schedulers, diagram and report tools.
- AGPL. Its obligations are triggered by serving users over a network, which is all a hosted platform does.
- Licences that look open and aren't, such as BSL, SSPL or the Elastic License.
- Anything that has to show its name in your app. A library's credit belongs in a licence file, not in your users' screens.
The licence is checked before a library is added, not after, because a library added for a demo is load-bearing by the next release.
What it cost
Keeping the rule has meant saying no to some good software:
- File storage. The obvious choice for S3-compatible storage was MinIO. It is AGPL, and its community repository was archived in April 2026, so it no longer gets security fixes. Parsware ships SeaweedFS (Apache-2.0) instead, and speaks the S3 API, so a deployment can still point at Amazon S3, Azure or any other S3-compatible store.
- Messaging. MassTransit is a popular .NET messaging library; its new version is commercial, with a free tier that ends when the user's revenue grows. For the queue, which is still being built, we chose the official RabbitMQ client (MPL-2.0 or Apache-2.0) behind a small interface of our own, so the choice can change without a rewrite.
- Charts. The best-known charting libraries are paid for commercial use. Parsware draws charts with Apache ECharts (Apache-2.0).
The rest of the stack was chosen under the same rule: PostgreSQL, .NET and Entity Framework Core, OpenIddict for sign-in, React, Radix UI and Tailwind CSS.
What we counted
For this article we listed every package on the front end's production dependency tree (the apps, the designers and the help site, with build and test tools left out) and read each one's licence:
| Licence | Packages |
|---|---|
| MIT | 1,126 |
| MIT-0 | 64 |
| ISC | 48 |
| Apache-2.0 | 42 |
| BSD-2-Clause and BSD-3-Clause | 49 |
| Others as permissive (0BSD, CC0, Unlicense, BlueOak, Python-2.0, Zlib, CC-BY-4.0, OFL) | 13 |
| A choice of licences, one of them MIT or Apache-2.0 | 8 |
| EPL-2.0 | 1 |
| Our own packages | 19 |
The one that needed reading twice is elkjs, which lays out a process drawing automatically in the process designer. It's under the Eclipse Public License 2.0, a licence of the same kind as MPL-2.0: free to ship in a commercial product, with no fee of any kind, as long as its own source stays available, which it is. It isn't on the list above, so we've raised it as a decision rather than let it pass quietly. That's 1,370 packages in all. The server side was simpler: 30 packages referenced directly, every one MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD-3-Clause or the PostgreSQL licence.
Why it matters to you
- The price can't move because of somebody else's licence. No part of Parsware is billed to us per user or per server, so there's nothing of that kind to pass on to you.
- Running it yourself stays possible. An Enterprise customer who runs Parsware on their own servers needs no licence key from anybody but us.
- Nothing in your app advertises a library. The screens your users see are yours.
Try it
Ask any platform vendor you're comparing which of their components are licensed per server or per user, and what happens to your price when that changes. Then look at our pricing.
Next: How we run parsware.com on Parsware.