Pricing & licensing
Free for noncommercial use. Licensed for business.
DCTL is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License. Personal use, charities, schools, universities, public research and government bodies get the complete tool free. Any business use needs a commercial licence.
Noncommercial
Freeforever
The complete tool, at no cost, for personal use and for organisations whose purpose is not commercial.
Download DCTL- Every feature — nothing is held back
- Personal study, hobby projects and private use
- Charities, schools, universities and public research
- Public safety, health, environmental and government bodies
- Modify it, and redistribute your changes
- Community support via GitHub issues
Under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. Funding source does not matter for a noncommercial organisation — a publicly funded university is still covered.
Commercial
Contact sales
Any use by or for a business, including evaluating DCTL against a real workload, needs a commercial licence.
Talk to sales- Everything in Noncommercial
- Commercial and revenue-generating use
- Deployment across company machines and CI
- Evaluation licence so you can trial it properly
- Email support with a defined response target
- Written licence agreement and invoicing
There is no free trial period. Ask us for an evaluation licence — we would rather you tested properly than not at all.
Enterprise
Contact sales
Site licensing, procurement paperwork and the assurances a security review will ask for.
Talk to sales- Everything in Commercial
- Site or org-wide licence, unlimited seats
- Priority support with an SLA
- Security-review and audit support, architecture briefings
- Custom terms, DPA and procurement onboarding
- Roadmap input and early access to release candidates
Not sure whether your use counts as commercial? Ask us — we would rather answer than have you guess.
Questions
Licensing, answered plainly
No. The PolyForm Noncommercial License permits noncommercial purposes only, so any use by or for a business needs a commercial licence — including a sole trader backing up client work. There is no free trial period built into the licence, so talk to us before you start: we issue evaluation licences and would much rather you tested DCTL properly than skipped it.
No. Use by an educational institution or public research organisation is a permitted purpose regardless of the source of funding or obligations resulting from that funding. That is written into the licence, not a discretionary discount.
No, and we will not claim it is. The source is published and readable at github.com/DCTL-SH/DCTL, and the licence lets you modify it and redistribute your changes. But PolyForm Noncommercial is source-available rather than OSI-approved, because it restricts who may use the software and for what. If your policy requires an OSI-approved licence, talk to us about a commercial agreement.
If you are learning the tool, archiving your own photo library or running a homelab, you are fine. If the work is intended to make money — for you, an employer or a client — that is commercial, whoever owns the machine. When in doubt, ask; we would rather answer a question than have you guess wrong.
Nothing. Your vaults are files on storage you control, in a design-frozen format with a published specification and a dependency-free C99 reference decoder. Nothing about the licence is technically enforced — there is no key check, no activation and no telemetry. A licence dispute can never make your data unreadable.
Partly, and we would rather say so than sell you a surprise. The crypto core, the frozen format, the encrypted index and the local backend are complete and exercised. The B2, S3 and R2 backends are implemented but have not yet been verified end to end against live providers, and the CLI is still mid-flight. The status table on this site tracks it honestly.
Talk to a human
Volume licensing, procurement paperwork, security review, or a question about whether your use case needs a licence at all.