What 'open source' means when you are buying funnel software

Somebody emails me about once a fortnight with a version of the same question. They have shortlisted a funnel builder, the homepage says “open source” in three separate places, and something on the pricing page has made them uneasy. Is it real?

The unease is usually well founded, and the reason it is hard to resolve is structural. “Open source” is not a regulated term. There is no trademark with teeth, no certification body you can complain to, and no penalty for using the phrase loosely in a hero section. The Open Source Initiative publishes a definition and approves licences against it, but that is a standard vendors opt into, not a law that binds them. A company can ship a licence that forbids you from running the software for clients, call the result open source in its marketing, and break no rule anyone can enforce.

This post is the buyer’s version of that problem. We keep a licence-by-licence table at /open-source-funnel-builders-compared with the current data for nine products. What follows is the method behind it: how to evaluate anyone’s open-source claim yourself, in about five minutes, including products that are not on our table and products that do not exist yet.

I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. It is a description of what licences say and what a published definition requires. If a decision here is consequential for your business, pay someone qualified to read the licence with you.

The one clause that settles most arguments

The Open Source Definition has ten criteria. In this category, nearly every dispute reduces to criterion six, “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor”, which says the licence must not restrict anyone from using the program in a specific field, and gives “being used in a business” as its own example.

So a licence that reads “free for your own use, paid the moment you run it for clients” restricts a specific field of endeavour, and is therefore not OSI open source. That is a statement about a definition, not an accusation about a company. The second clause worth knowing is criterion three, which requires that the licence allow modifications and derived works to be distributed. That is the one that decides whether a fork is actually available to you when you need it.

Two clauses, and you can evaluate most claims without reading the rest.

The four arrangements the phrase covers

On funnel-builder homepages specifically, “open source” is used for at least four different deals. I care less about the taxonomy than about what each one costs you.

An OSI-approved licence (Apache-2.0, MIT, GPL). You can use it, change it, redistribute it, fork it, and run it for paying clients without asking permission or paying a second bill. Apache-2.0 also grants a patent licence and asks you to state your changes. GPL requires derivative works you distribute to stay under the GPL, which is a real obligation but not a commercial-use restriction.

Fair-code or source-available. The source is published and readable. The licence carves out commercial use, and the carve-out almost always lands exactly where an agency’s business model starts. On our table, Launchtic sits here: a Sustainable Use License, with a pricing page that summarises it as “Pay only if you’re running Launchtic for clients” and an agency tier at $997 per year, checked 2026-08-03.

A public repository with no licence file. Readable, not reusable. Copyright applies by default and no rights are granted, so the repo is a reference to learn from rather than a foundation to build on. This is usually neglect rather than trickery, and the practical result is the same either way.

A free plugin with a proprietary paid add-on. The free half is genuinely GPL. The half containing the funnel features is a separate proprietary download behind a subscription key. All three WordPress options on our table have this shape, and their GPL versions are not even identical: CartFlows and WPFunnels ship GPLv2 or later, FunnelKit ships GPLv3.

If you run one store for yourself, three of those four feel the same in practice. The moment somebody else’s business is involved, they stop feeling the same at all.

Four questions that change your answer

The right licence depends on what you are going to do, so answer these before you read a single LICENSE file.

Are you doing this for other people? Freelancers, agencies, and anyone folding the tool into a retainer are the group fair-code licences are designed to charge. If that is you, the commercial carve-out is not a footnote, it is a line item. Price it as one.

Will you ever need to fork it? Not “do you plan to” - almost nobody plans to. The question is what happens if the vendor pivots, gets acquired, or drops the feature your checkout depends on. Under Apache-2.0 or MIT, a fork is a Tuesday afternoon. Under a source-available licence, a fork you distribute or run commercially may need permission you do not have.

What breaks when you stop paying? Run the thought experiment concretely. Does the software keep running, degrade to a free tier, or stop? For plugin-plus-add-on products, the funnel features are usually the ones that stop. That is not a scandal, it is the deal, but it should be a deal you entered knowingly.

Who holds the data and the domain? Licences say nothing about export. Separately from the licence, check whether you can get your orders, contacts, and page definitions out in a format you can read, and whether the funnel runs on a domain you control. A permissive licence on software you cannot get your data out of is a smaller win than it looks.

The five-minute due diligence check

These are the same commands our comparison page publishes, because we would rather you did not take our word for any row. Each returns a fact rather than an opinion.

# 1. What licence does GitHub actually detect in the repo?
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/OWNER/REPO | grep spdx_id

# 2. Does the repository the marketing page links to even exist?
curl -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://api.github.com/repos/OWNER/REPO

# 3. What licence does a WordPress plugin really ship under?
curl -s https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/SLUG/trunk/readme.txt | grep -i '^License'

# 4. Read the licence itself, not the summary
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OWNER/REPO/HEAD/LICENSE | head -40

How to read the output:

• A clean SPDX id such as Apache-2.0, MIT, GPL-3.0 means the licence is one GitHub recognises. Cross-check it against the approved list at opensource.org/licenses.
• NOASSERTION, Other, or null means GitHub could not match it to a known licence. That is your signal to open the LICENSE file and read it, because custom licences are where commercial carve-outs live.
• A 404 on step two means the repository advertised on the marketing page is not public. Source you cannot fetch is not source-available in any useful sense.
• No LICENSE file at all means no rights granted, whatever the README says.

Then do one non-technical step: search the pricing page for the words “client”, “agency”, “commercial”, and “hosted”. Fair-code restrictions are usually described more plainly in pricing copy than in the licence text, because that copy is trying to sell you the tier.

We run this against ourselves too. scripts/verify-licences.mjs in our repo re-checks every row of the comparison table against its own source, so no row inherits a neighbour’s evidence, and the date it last passed is printed on the page. If a row goes stale, that is a bug on our side.

A genuine defence of fair-code

It would be convenient for me to end here, since Autonnel is Apache-2.0 and the argument flatters us. But the case for fair-code is stronger than the open-source-purity discourse usually admits.

Permissive licensing has a well-known failure mode: a small team gives away everything, a larger company with better distribution wraps it in a managed service, and the original authors get GitHub stars instead of revenue. Fair-code licences are a direct response to that. n8n is the reference case, and the term itself grew up around that licence. The software they produced is excellent, the source is genuinely readable, and the money that funds it comes from the companies extracting the most value.

For most buyers, that trade is fine. If you are running one business on the software, a fair-code licence and an OSI licence are functionally identical, and the fair-code vendor is probably better capitalised. Choosing it is not settling.

My objection is narrow and it is about the word, not the model. If your licence charges agencies, say so in the same breath as “open source”, not eleven scrolls down. The person harmed by the ambiguity is a freelancer who builds three client funnels on a free tier and discovers a $997 obligation after the work is delivered.

The same standard, applied to us

Autonnel is Apache-2.0 on a public repository. No commercial-use restriction, no agency tier, no licence key gating features. Run command one above against autonnel/autonnel and you get Apache-2.0 back, which is the only reason you should believe this paragraph.

Where we lose: the project is young, the community is small, and there is no third party you can hire who already knows it. A licence is not a track record, and no amount of Apache-2.0 makes up for a missing Stack Overflow tag. Our managed cloud is a hosting convenience rather than a licence upgrade, which is the specific claim you should hold us to.

For the product-level comparison rather than the licence-level one, open-source ClickFunnels alternatives in 2026 walks through the same shortlist by what the products actually do, including where ours is the wrong choice.

The takeaway is not “pick the OSI licence”. It is that the licence file is the contract and the homepage is a claim, and telling them apart takes four commands and five minutes. The current data lives at /open-source-funnel-builders-compared, with the date it was last verified printed at the top. Check ours the same way you check theirs.