Licence Question

[Donatello666]

Hi Greensock Team,

 

My team is about to program an own product our customers will be charged for. We also want to include GSAP in this product. So how is it about the licence-model? Do we need a seperate licence for each customer?

 

THX for your help

 

Christoph Santo

[ZachSaucier]

Hey Donatello, thanks for asking about this - it shows that you're an honorable developer. You’re exactly the type of customer we love to serve!

 

The type of usage you described requires the special commercial license that comes with “Business Green” Club GreenSock memberships which you can purchase for as little as $150/year. That also gets you all of the bonus plugins as well which might open up some really fun possibilities in your animations.

 

Your license covers an unlimited number of your products while it’s active. The only caveat is that it covers your unedited work, meaning that if your clients/customers want to make any changes, they’d need to get their own license. Otherwise, it’d make it easy for a huge company like Microsoft to circumvent the license by hiring a freelancer to start a project and then take it in-house and piggy-back on that single-developer license without getting their own license for their numerous developers. See what I mean? But again, all of the work you do is covered as long as it’s not edited by others outside your organization. 

 

Our entire licensing model (which you can read about on our licensing page) is based on the honor system and a simple number-of-developers pricing structure. We don’t require that you “register" each person or project, nor do we inject “phone home” scripts that report usage or suddenly cause things to stop working if your license expires. We extend respect to our users and trust that it'll be reciprocated. Thus far, it has worked well. We’ve been doing this for a decade now with no plans to stop. 

 

In terms of how to count developers, it’s based on the number of people who would actually use GreenSock tools, not your clients (unless they are editing GSAP-related code). It’s not intended to be a license that gets passed around from person-to-person, like “Hey Sally, can you stop using GreenSock for 5 minutes so I can update something?” So if a company has 3 developers who use GreenSock from time to time, they should get the “Up to 5 developers” license. You can always upgrade later too.

 

I’m pretty confident you’ll find that the license pays for itself very quickly when you consider the time it saves you, the added capabilities, performance, reliability, etc. Typically our customers find that it pays for itself literally in a matter of days (or weeks at the most). But if you’re not happy we’ll gladly issue a full refund. We’re passionate about having happy customers around here. 

 

Does that make sense? If you have additional questions it would be good to provide more information about your use case. If it's private information, you're welcome to use our contact form to provide it to us.

 

Happy tweening.

[Donatello666]

Hi Zach,

 

thank for the quick replay ?. So far so good. One last question: we just have at least an eye on the active licence to sell our product. With no active licence, we are not allowed to sell our product any more till we renew the licence. Is this right?

 

 

Best regards

 

Chris

[ZachSaucier]

15 minutes ago, Donatello666 said:

With no active licence, we are not allowed to sell our product any more till we renew the licence. Is this right?

You should have an active GreenSock license for all times when one is needed, so yes you are correct (as far as I am understanding at least). 

[Donatello666]

Yes,

 

i thought about this fictive scenario:

 

we have a licence for 2 years and are selling our product. The third year we have no active licence and are not selling our product anymore (not what is going to happen - hope so). In the 4th year we can sell our product again, but before doing so we got to renew the licence.

 

or in short: as long as we are selling our product, we need an active licence.

 

Chris

[ZachSaucier]

3 minutes ago, Donatello666 said:

as long as we are selling our product, we need an active licence.

Correct!

[Donatello666]

Hi Zach,

 

perfect. I know why to love GSAP. ?

 

Have a nice day & Sincerely Yours

 

Chris

[MZBS]

What if you are doing a personal project or portfolio website just for fun. Is it necessary the license? Or only for projects you are going to get money from? 

 

I am learning now GSAP and would love to try it on a real project soon but for now I am just testing on personal projects. 

 

Thanks! 

 

 

[ZachSaucier]

6 minutes ago, MZBS said:

What if you are doing a personal project or portfolio website just for fun. Is it necessary the license? Or only for projects you are going to get money from? 

 

I am learning now GSAP and would love to try it on a real project soon but for now I am just testing on personal projects. 

You would need a business license if you are selling a product that uses GSAP in it to multiple end clients. So for most personal portfolio sites and things like that, GSAP is completely free to use. See our licensing page for more details: https://greensock.com/licensing/

 

The other time you might need a Club GreenSock membership is if you want to use the club plugins on your project. They are free to use on CodePen but if you need to include them on your portfolio, for example, you would need to get the corresponding Club Membership. There is a helpful overview of what's free and what's included in the club membership in the GSAP Overview found in our docs: https://greensock.com/docs/ A similar listing is found on our club page: https://greensock.com/club/

[MZBS]

1 minute ago, ZachSaucier said:

You would need a business license if you are selling a product that uses GSAP in it to multiple end clients. So for most personal portfolio sites and things like that, GSAP is completely free to use. See our licensing page for more details: https://greensock.com/licensing/

 

The other time you might need a Club GreenSock membership is if you want to use the club plugins on your project. They are free to use on CodePen but if you need to include them on your portfolio, for example, you would need to get the corresponding Club Membership. There is a helpful overview of what's free and what's included in the club membership in the GSAP Overview found in our docs: https://greensock.com/docs/ A similar listing is found on our club page: https://greensock.com/club/

 

Perfect, thank you!