Plain-English summary. The authoritative legal terms are in LICENSE; current plans and prices are at https://wolfstack.org/enterprise.php. If anything here disagrees with the LICENSE file, the LICENSE file wins.
WolfStack is source-available, not open source. It is free for personal, homelab, education, research, and non-profit use under the PolyForm Noncommercial Licence 1.0.0. Commercial use requires a paid subscription. Separately, anyone can sponsor development on GitHub or Patreon — that's an optional donation, not a licence.
These get confused constantly, so to be explicit:
| Sponsorship (GitHub / Patreon) | Commercial licence (subscription) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A voluntary donation that funds development | A paid right to use WolfStack commercially |
| Who it's for | Homelab / personal users who want to chip in | Any business or revenue-generating use |
| Grants commercial-use rights? | No | Yes |
| Unlocks paid features? | No | Yes (see below) |
| In-app perks | No support nag, early-access (beta) builds, private roadmap, Discord support | All of that, plus the licensed features |
| Cancel anytime? | Yes | Subscription term applies |
Sponsoring does not make commercial use legal. If you run WolfStack at or for a business, you need a commercial licence even if you also sponsor.
Almost everything is free for everyone. A small set of business features are gated behind a commercial licence:
| Feature | Free (noncommercial) | Licence required |
|---|---|---|
| Docker / LXC / VM management, clustering, networking, storage, backups, status pages, monitoring, the App Store, WolfNet, WolfRouter… | ✅ | |
| Managed hosting (WolfHost — customers, plans, billing, customer portal, hosting tools) | ✅ | |
| API tokens | Homelab+ | |
| SSO | Team+ | |
| Plugins | MSP+ | |
| Multi-tenancy | MSP+ | |
| White-label (WolfCustom) | MSP+ |
Managed hosting is free for everyone as a feature. Running a hosting business is a commercial use, so a commercial licence is still required for that under the base terms above — but the WolfHost feature itself is no longer tier-gated.
A licence file is deployed to
/etc/wolfstack/license.key; the binary validates its signature locally and never phones home for verification.
Buy at https://wolfstack.org/enterprise.php. Feature inclusions (from the licence the binary validates):
| Tier | Adds | Hosts |
|---|---|---|
| Homelab | Commercial-use right + API tokens | capped |
| Team | + SSO | capped |
| MSP | + plugins, multi-tenancy, white-label | capped |
| Enterprise | Everything | unlimited / quoted |
For bespoke SLAs, air-gapped deployment, compliance collateral, custom development, or large-fleet pricing, contact sales@wolf.uk.com.
Sponsoring is a donation. Every paying sponsor — at any amount — gets the same in-app perks: the support nag stops, and the beta update channel unlocks. Higher tiers are about recognition and how much you're helping, not about unlocking different features. (Beta builds used to require a higher Patreon tier while a free self-attest also granted them — that inconsistency is gone: beta = any supporter.)
Recommended levels, kept the same across GitHub Sponsors and Patreon so there's one coherent ladder:
| Monthly | Name | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| $3 | Supporter | Funds development. No support nag, early-access beta builds, private roadmap, Discord supporter role. |
| $25 | Backer | Everything above + your name on the supporters page / in-app credits. |
| $95 | Platinum | Everything above + your logo + link on the website, priority issue triage. |
Action required (one-time, on GitHub): GitHub Sponsors tiers are configured in the GitHub Sponsors dashboard, not in this repo. Create the three tiers above at https://github.com/sponsors/intelligentwolf/dashboard so they line up with the Patreon tiers (
$3Basic,$25Advanced,$95Platinum) thatsrc/patreon.rsalready recognises.
The binary considers you a supporter — removing the nag and unlocking beta — if any of these is true:
- A valid commercial licence is present (
/etc/wolfstack/license.key). - A linked Patreon account with a paying pledge ($3+/mo). Verified via the Patreon API (link it in Settings).
- The operator has ticked "I'm a GitHub Sponsor" (honour system — GitHub's API doesn't let us enumerate sponsors, so we trust the tick).
Releases up to and including v22.9.x were published under the MIT Licence and remain available under it in perpetuity. v22.10.0 and later are under the dual licence described above.
WolfStack™, WolfRouter™, WolfAgents™, WolfNet™, WolfFlow™, WolfRun™, WolfUSB™ and WolfDisk™ are trademarks of IntelligentWolf Ltd. The licence covers the source code, not the trademarks.