Honour-system licensing
n8-m8 does not phone home to ask whether you paid. Personal, homelab, educational, and non-commercial self-hosting is free. If it supports paid client work or business operations, choose the commercial licence that matches your use.
No licence activation. No licence telemetry. No outbound licence audit signal. No remote kill switch. The EULA still applies. Source-available, not OSI open source; best-effort monitoring only; prices below are in USD.
Three honest paths
Choose by actual use: personal and non-commercial, solo paid client work, or business and service-provider operation. The product will not inspect or report that choice.
Personal, homelab, educational, and non-commercial use.
Free
One solo freelancer or consultant using n8-m8 for paid client work or professional automation operations.
$20 USD / month
Businesses, teams, agencies, MSPs, and managed-service operators using n8-m8 across internal or client automation operations.
$60 USD / month
A commercial sponsor licence means an active paid sponsorship, membership, invoice, subscription, or written licence confirmation issued or accepted by the current publisher and licensor for the applicable tier. Sponsorships that supply commercial-use rights or other benefits are commercial payments for those benefits, not pure donations.
A practical dividing line
Personal projects, homelabs, education, and genuinely non-commercial use can use the free licence under the EULA.
Choose the freelancer and consultant tier when one operator uses n8-m8 for paid client work or their own professional automation operations.
Choose the business and service-provider tier for companies, teams, agencies, MSPs, managed services, and multi-client commercial operation.
What payment does—and does not—mean
An active commercial tier grants the applicable commercial-use rights under the current EULA. It does not turn the self-hosted software into a managed service.
The trust contract
We would rather trust you than track you.
n8-m8 has no activation server, phone-home licence check, licence telemetry, outbound licence audit beacon, or remote kill switch. The software sends the n8-m8 operator no automatic deployment or licence-state signal, so the operator cannot automatically discover a deployment or verify whether a licence is active.
We know an honour system leaves room for abuse. We accept that trade-off. A monitoring tool should not turn its users into the thing being monitored.
Commercial use still requires the applicable paid licence. We trust people who need one and can afford it to pay. If you cannot afford it today, the free personal and genuinely non-commercial path remains open; we hope it helps you reach a point where you can.
Read the full EULAThe practical licensing boundaries for personal, solo commercial, and organisational use.
Commercial use includes business use, revenue-generating automation operations, paid client work, agency or MSP use, managed-service use, team use, or use by or for an organisation.
A solo freelancer or consultant doing paid client work uses the USD $20 per month tier. Businesses, teams, agencies, MSPs, and managed-service operators use the USD $60 per month tier.
No. No tier includes guaranteed support, response times, uptime commitments, hosting, deployment services, consulting, maintenance, security monitoring, professional advice, or an SLA unless separately agreed in writing.
No. n8-m8 uses honour-system licensing and has no activation server, phone-home licence check, licence telemetry, outbound licence audit signal, or remote kill switch. The n8-m8 operator cannot automatically discover a deployment or verify whether a licence is active through the product. Commercial use still requires the applicable paid licence.
The free personal, homelab, educational, and genuinely non-commercial path remains open. We hope it helps you build toward the day you can support the project. Commercial use still requires the applicable paid licence.
Commercial-use rights end if the applicable membership, sponsorship, subscription, invoice, or payment fails, expires, is cancelled, or is refunded, unless separately agreed otherwise in writing.
These summaries are for orientation. The EULA and terms govern your use.
Built on good faith
No activation server will chase you. The free personal and non-commercial path stays open, and we hope what you build helps put paid work—and support for the project—within reach later. Commercial use still requires the applicable licence.
