Every founder building on someone else's platform eventually meets the same wall: the licence or the pricing sheet was written to extract more from you exactly as you start to win. Build-from-scratch punishes you at the start; rented SaaS punishes you at the end. VBWD's licence is an attempt to invert that. It's free while you're small, and it only asks for a commercial arrangement once you've genuinely crossed into scale. Here's how it actually works, said plainly, including the part where you do owe money.
VBWD ships under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL) with a Bitcoin-denominated Additional Use Grant. In practice that means three things:
The threshold is denominated in Bitcoin on purpose. It's tied to VBWD-attributable sales — the revenue the platform actually helped you earn — rather than a per-seat count or a slice of every transaction. It scales with the value of the network it's measured against, not with a vendor's appetite. 6.7 BTC per year is not a hobbyist's number. If you're crossing it, you have a genuine business, and a commercial conversation at that point is a reasonable cost of a successful one.
It would be easy — and dishonest — to wave the word "open" around here, so let's be exact. BSL is source-available, not OSI-approved open-source. The Additional Use Grant is broad, but there is a usage restriction (the sales threshold), and a restriction is precisely what disqualifies a licence from the Open Source Definition. If your organisation has a hard policy that only accepts OSI-approved licences, BSL will not satisfy it today. It satisfies it after the Change Date, when the code becomes Apache-2.0.
What source-available does give you is most of what teams actually want when they say "open," and everything that closed SaaS withholds:
Closed SaaS gives you none of these. You get a dashboard and a promise.
Starting from an empty repository, the expensive months come before a single customer pays you. Authentication, RBAC, multi-tenancy, subscription billing with tarif plans and add-ons, invoicing, discounts, referrals, payout/withdraw flows, a shop with orders and stock, webhooks, an admin back office — none of that is your differentiator, and all of it has to exist before you can charge for the thing that is. That's payroll spent on undifferentiated plumbing while revenue is zero.
VBWD's proposition here is that the plumbing already exists and toggles on. The core is intentionally agnostic; capabilities live as plugins that switch on and off without a restart, in their own space, never requiring you to fork the core. Booking, marketplace, shop, subscription, token/metered billing, dataset sales, CMS, chat and an LLM connection layer, MCP-native agent-callable endpoints, and a wide bank of payment providers — Stripe, PayPal, PromptPay, Mercado Pago, Conekta, Toss, YooKassa, TrueMoney — plus provider-agnostic, non-custodial crypto/stablecoin settlement that lands in your wallet. Real verticals have already been built on it as proof it extends: a tarot app, a dice-market game, a pharmacy shop, and dataset publishing. You spend your early months on your product, not on rebuilding checkout for the thousandth time.
Hosted SaaS inverts the pain. It's cheap to start and expensive to succeed. Per-seat fees, per-transaction cuts, usage tiers — the bill is engineered to rise in lockstep with your growth, and it quietly sets a ceiling on your margin. The better you do, the larger the slice the platform takes, and you never stop paying because you never own anything. You're also exposed to their roadmap, their pricing changes, and their decision to deprecate whatever you depend on.
Under BSL, the curve is shaped the opposite way. Below the threshold you pay nothing for the licence — you own the deployment outright — and the one payment event is a commercial licence that triggers only after you've crossed a real, sizeable revenue line. You are not handing over a recurring percentage of every dollar forever. You pay once you're clearly winning, and even then it's a defined arrangement rather than an open-ended tax on your success.
None of this makes VBWD a shortcut to a business. It's a substrate. You still design and build the differentiated product on top — the thing customers actually pay you for — and self-hosting means you own the operations: deployment, upgrades, security patching, backups, uptime. That's real work and real responsibility. What VBWD removes is the undifferentiated foundation and the licence trap; what it does not remove is the job of building something people want and running it well. And to repeat the caveat without softening it: cross the 6.7-BTC-per-year threshold and a commercial licence applies. That's by design, and it's the fair end of the bargain.
If that trade — free while you're small, source you can read and self-host, a defined licence once you're genuinely at scale — fits how you'd rather build, start with the public SDK at github.com/VBWD-platform/vbwd-sdk-public, and if you want to talk through where your business sits relative to the threshold, reach us at vbwd.cc/contact.
VBWD is source-available under BSL 1.1 — free for commercial use while annual VBWD-attributable sales stay under the value of 6.7 BTC per year.