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Licensing

Generally availableUpdated 2026-05-14
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Overview

PDFluent is published under the GNU AGPLv3. That is the default and it is the complete product: no feature is withheld, no key is required, nothing expires.

The commercial licence is the alternative for organisations that cannot accept the AGPL's copyleft obligation. You are not buying features — you are buying the right not to publish your own source.

All six language channels (Rust, Python, WASM/JavaScript, Node.js, .NET, Java) are covered by the same licence. There is no separate seat per channel.

The AGPL route

  • Full feature set. Nothing is held back for paying customers.
  • No time limit, no key, no sign-up.
  • In return: if you convey the software, or let users interact with a modified version over a network, you must offer those users the corresponding source under the same licence.

Perpetual

A commercial licence is perpetual for the versions named on the order form. It does not stop working, and there is no mechanism by which it could — nothing in the software checks a date, a key or a server. Which later releases you receive is what the order form's support term decides; the rights over what you already have are not bounded by it.

Nothing to activate

There is no licence key and no activation step, on any channel. Nothing reads a key, nothing is withheld and output carries no mark. A commercial licence is a signed order form, an invoice and an entry in our licence register — those are the deliverables. To start that, mail [email protected]; we respond within one business day.

Model files

Model files are a separate download, installed with pdfluent models install layout tables from the CLI archives on the 1.1.0 release page. The layout model heron_ep03.onnx is trained by PDFluent: a fine-tune of IBM's docling-layout-heron-101 (Apache-2.0) on the DocLayNet training split (CDLA-Permissive-1.0), licensed under the SDK terms, with Apache-2.0 attribution to IBM's base model. The table model tatr-v1.1-all.onnx is Microsoft Table Transformer v1.1-all, an unmodified ONNX export, MIT. ONNX Runtime 1.23.2 libraries are MIT. Third-party files are provided as-is under their own licences. Full text: MODELS-NOTICE.txt in the release. See the models-v1 release [B48]. ```