Licence

This page explains Annotide’s licence in plain language. It is a summary, not a substitute for the licence text itself. The actual, legally binding licence is LICENSE.md in the source repository: the Elastic License 2.0, verbatim, with R Squared Data Solutions’ copyright notice attached. If anything on this page conflicts with LICENSE.md, the licence file controls.

The short version

• Annotide is source-available, not closed-source software. You can read every line of it on GitHub.
• You may use, copy, modify and run it, commercially too. Without a licence key it runs as the Community edition: up to three active users and every annotation feature.
• A licence key adds people and features: Team for more users, Business for single sign-on, SCIM, folder permissions, full audit history, quality control and the enterprise integrations, Enterprise for invoicing, offline keys and contract terms (see pricing).
• Three things are not allowed: getting around the licence key (moving, changing or disabling it, or removing what it protects), offering Annotide to others as a hosted or managed service, and removing or hiding the licence, copyright or other notices.

What Community includes

Everything an annotation team works with: every media type and tool, pre-labelling with your own model, interactive segmentation and OCR, active learning, import and export in every format, snapshots, splits and lineage, every storage connector except SharePoint, the task queue and review, API keys, the Python SDK and CLI, webhooks, the MCP server, MFA, GDPR export and erasure, and the Helm chart and operations tooling. Your data is never behind a key: reading and export work in every edition and at every stage.

The Python SDK, CLI and MCP server (pip install annotide) are under the Apache License 2.0 instead, so you can use them in your own pipelines and tools without a licence review. They only talk to an Annotide server, which stays under the Elastic License.

Examples

Fine on Community:

• A three-person startup labelling training data for the product it sells.
• A freelancer annotating a client’s dataset as paid work.
• A university research group of three.
• A company’s data scientist trying Annotide before proposing it to IT.

Needs a key:

• A fourth person on the same install (Team, Business or Enterprise).
• Signing in with the company’s Entra ID or another OIDC provider, SCIM, folder-level permissions, audit history beyond 30 days, consensus and quality metrics, SharePoint, Azure ML / Databricks / MLflow (Business or Enterprise). An administrator can try all of these free for 30 days.

Not allowed under any edition:

• Patching out the licence check to get more users or Business features.
• Running Annotide as a hosted service that your customers sign in to. Hosting it for your own organisation, in your own cloud, is fine. If you want to host it for clients, ask us about a partner agreement.

Several Community installs

Each Community install is licensed on its own. Separate installs can’t share review, consensus, a schema registry or snapshots, though, so a team that splits mainly loses the collaboration the product exists to provide. One Team install is usually cheaper than the coordination.

When a key ends

A trial goes back to Community at once. A paid key gets 30 days of grace after its period ends; then annotation work pauses until it’s renewed. Reading and export always keep working, and a lapsed Business licence never weakens security: folder permissions stay enforced and the audit log keeps recording.

Open questions this page doesn’t answer

If your situation doesn’t match an example above, email hello@annotide.com rather than guess.

Full licence text

The complete, verbatim licence is in LICENSE.md at the root of the source repository, and at elastic.co.