Source-available.
Subscription-licensed.

Your subscription doesn't just license the binary — it licenses the source. Every file in the install tree is hand-authored, readable .NET 10, Razor, and Markdown. There's no obfuscation, no compiled-blob "core," no hidden service you depend on to render a page.

That changes what you can do with InkCMS:

• Audit it. Walk the code. Confirm the auth flow, the license heartbeat, the encryption choices. Hand it to your security team. No NDA required — you already have the source.
• Customize it without forking. The InkCMS/Custom/ folder is your dedicated surface for site-specific controllers, services, view overrides, and Razor templates. Product updates never overwrite it. Build deep customization without ever needing to fork the product.
• Use it as a base for something larger. If you're building a vertical-specific product — a CMS for law firms, a course platform, an internal portal — InkCMS is a perfectly reasonable foundation. License terms allow you to extend it with your own code; talk to us if you want to redistribute the result, and we'll work out an OEM arrangement.
• Patch it in an emergency. Critical bug at 2am? You don't have to wait for a vendor release. Fix it locally, ship a patched build, and send us the diff so it lands in the next release. (We aim to land community patches fast.)
• Survive us. If InkCMS ever stops supporting the product, you keep a working copy of the source on disk — under whatever rights your existing subscription grants. The continuity-of-business clause in your subscription terms spells out exactly what happens in that scenario.

Source-available is a real, durable advantage over closed SaaS. We're not opting into the OSI definition of open source — this is a commercial license — but we are opting into source visibility because that's what serious teams need.

The LICENSE.md file at the root of every InkCMS installation is the legal document of record. It's the InkCMS Commercial Source-Available License — a custom proprietary license, written for the way single-vendor source-available products actually work:

• Licensor: InkCMS.
• Licensed Work: InkCMS, the version distributed in this installation, including all source files.
• Grant of use: A non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable right to install, run, modify, and operate the Licensed Work for a single website on a single registered hostname, contingent on an active subscription. Local development and .local/.test/localhost use is permitted without a subscription. Each additional website requires its own subscription.
• Source rights: You may read, audit, and modify the source for your own use. You may extend it via InkCMS/Custom/ or by patching files directly. You may not redistribute the source or modified versions to third parties, publish it publicly, or include it in another product without a separate agreement.
• Restrictions: No managed-service / SaaS resale, no OEM redistribution, no removal of attribution, no circumvention of the license guard — see § 01 above.
• Term: The grant continues for as long as your subscription is active. Termination of the subscription terminates the grant of production use. You retain the right to keep a copy of the source on disk for archival and to migrate your content off.
• No automatic conversion: Unlike time-bounded source-available licenses (BSL, FSL), this license does not auto-convert to an open-source license after any period. The grant terms remain in force for the life of the Licensed Work.

The full legal text is in your installation's LICENSE.md. If your legal team needs to review before purchase, use the contact form with subject "Legal review" — we'll send a redlinable copy.

InkCMS is provided "AS IS" and "WHERE IS," without warranty of any kind — express, implied, statutory, or otherwise. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we disclaim every implied warranty including, without limitation, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation.

We take security seriously, but no application is impenetrable. We follow defensive coding practices, ship security patches quickly, encrypt sensitive data at rest, and run third-party dependency audits — and we still cannot guarantee that InkCMS, your install of it, your server, your network, your hosting provider, or the broader internet will never be breached, downed, or impaired. The decision to run InkCMS in production is your decision, made with full awareness that software fails, services go down, and adversaries are persistent.

You are solely responsible for:

• Operating your server, including OS patching, network hardening, TLS configuration, backups, and incident response.
• The content you publish through InkCMS — its accuracy, its legality in your jurisdiction, and its compliance with the rights of any third parties (copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity, etc.).
• Any third-party services you integrate with InkCMS (AI providers, SMTP relays, payment processors, analytics, storage adapters, etc.) and their terms.
• Reviewing the InkCMS source before deploying it, since you have the source and can.

Limitation of liability. To the maximum extent permitted by law, in no event will InkCMS be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, business opportunities, goodwill, or substitute services, arising from or related to your use of InkCMS — even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages. Our total cumulative liability, for all claims arising under or related to the Licensed Work, will not exceed the amount you paid to us in subscription fees during the twelve (12) months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim. These limits apply regardless of legal theory (contract, tort, strict liability, statute, or otherwise) and survive termination.

Hold harmless / indemnification. You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless InkCMS, its officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any and all claims, demands, actions, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising from or related to (a) the content you publish through InkCMS, (b) your operation of the server or infrastructure on which InkCMS runs, (c) your customization or modification of the InkCMS source, (d) any breach, downtime, data loss, or security incident affecting your site or your visitors, and (e) any violation of these license terms by you or anyone you allow to access your install.

The combination of these clauses is what lets us offer source visibility, fast iteration, and accessible pricing instead of the warranty-laden contracts of larger vendors. Enterprise customers who need explicit warranties, indemnities, or SLAs should reach out — those are available under a separate enterprise agreement, priced accordingly.

InkCMS is a single-vendor product, not a community-governed open-source project — but we welcome pull requests. The customer-facing private GitHub repo (after you've signed up) is where the source lives. Contributions are accepted under a contributor license agreement (CLA) that assigns copyright and patent rights for the contribution to InkCMS, so we can incorporate it under the license everyone else operates under.

The simplest contributions to get merged are: bug fixes with a reproduction, documentation improvements, additional Razor templates and partials for common patterns, and CSS refinements. Larger structural changes should start with a conversation — open an issue or reach out via the contact form.