Open Innovation Grant

The Open Innovation Grant (OIG) provides free personal and commercial use of Directus, in perpetuity, to individuals and to organizations with less than $5M in annual revenue and fewer than 50 employees. Eligibility is assessed based on the people who log into the Directus Studio. Full terms are set out in the Open Innovation Grant terms, and common questions are answered in the OIG FAQ.

Apply for the Open Innovation Grant to receive a license key. Once you have it, follow Managing Your License to apply it to your instance.

This page covers who qualifies, what the grant includes, how its activations work across environments, and how it behaves in CI pipelines and database restores.

Haven't Received Your Key?

License keys are delivered by email. If your key has not arrived, check your spam or junk folder, as grant emails are often filtered there.

Eligibility

Eligibility depends on who logs into the Studio, not on who uses the applications you build with Directus.

• Individuals qualify based on their own finances, not their employer's. A side project built by an employee of a large company is eligible.
• Small businesses and agencies qualify with less than $5M in annual revenue and fewer than 50 employees.
• Non-profits qualify with less than $5M in annual revenue and fewer than 50 employees. Unpaid volunteers do not count as employees.
• Government organizations are not eligible.

When you build projects for clients, the client's size only matters if the client logs into the Studio:

• If only you log in, eligibility is measured on your own size, even when the client is a large enterprise.
• If the client also logs in, the client must meet the same revenue and headcount thresholds for that project.

If you or a client does not qualify, use the free core tier, purchase a Team license, or contact sales.

How Thresholds Are Measured

• Employees are full-time and part-time staff. Unpaid non-profit volunteers and students do not count.
• Annual revenue is revenue from sales of products or services. Donations, grants, and other funding are not revenue.
• Companies under common ownership are measured as a group.

If you grow past $5M in revenue or 50 employees, contact sales within 90 days to find the right license.

Versions Covered

The grant applies to Directus 12.0.0 and later. Earlier versions remain governed by the license they were released under and do not require a license key.

What's Included

An OIG license is not a trial or a reduced edition. It is the same software paid customers run, with no caps specific to the grant:

• Unlimited seats, collections, and flows.
• Entitlement-gated features such as SSO and custom access policies.

A grant license has the following limitations:

• Telemetry is required and cannot be disabled.
• Product support is not included. Use the community for help, or arrange paid support separately.
• Offline mode is not available. Air-gapped deployments require an Enterprise license.
• Directus may list your name and logo as a user of Directus.

The main thing to plan around is the number of activations, covered below.

Building Products With the Grant

You can use the grant to build and sell your own products, including SaaS applications, as long as you stay within the thresholds. End users of your applications do not count toward eligibility or seats, even when they authenticate against Directus.

You can extend and modify Directus for your own use, including extensions, hooks, endpoints, custom interfaces, layouts, panels, modules, and configuration. The grant does not allow you to:

• Resell, redistribute, sub-license, or white-label Directus or the Studio.
• Remove or replace Directus branding.
• Modify the source code to bypass the license's limits.

The test is whether your customers use your application or use Directus itself.

Term and Revocation

An OIG license is granted in perpetuity. It has no expiration date and no renewal process.

You can terminate the grant at any time. Directus may review grants and request proof of eligibility. Directus may revoke a license or disable its key if:

• The eligibility information you provided is inaccurate.
• The license owner no longer meets the revenue or headcount thresholds.
• The grant terms are violated.

The terms of the grant can change over time. A grant you have accepted stays under the terms you accepted unless you choose to accept updated terms.

Licensing Service Availability

An OIG license validates online against the Directus licensing service.

• First activation: If the instance cannot reach the licensing service on first activation, it starts on the core tier and retries every hour until activation succeeds.
• After activation: If the instance cannot reach the licensing service for more than 7 days, it downgrades to the core tier. If usage is above core tier limits at that point, the instance becomes locked down.

Activations

Each OIG license key includes 5 activations. An activation binds the key to one instance at its PUBLIC_URL on first use, and that binding authenticates all later revalidation requests for the instance. See Activations and project bindings for the full mechanics and the deactivation flow.

Five activations are intended to cover the distinct environments of a single project, such as local, dev, staging, and production, with one spare. A new activation is pending for its first 24 hours and only counts toward your 5 once the instance stays active past that point. Because a license binds to your PUBLIC_URL and project database rather than to a container or IP address, you do not consume a separate activation for each replica.

Multiple Projects and Agencies

A single key and its 5 activations are meant for one project across its environments. If you build and host Directus for multiple clients or run several distinct projects, apply for a separate OIG key per project. Each key receives its own 5 activations, so a project's environments never compete with another project's for slots.

Replicas and Horizontal Scaling

A license binds to your project and PUBLIC_URL, not to a container, IP address, or instance identity. In a horizontally scaled deployment, every replica shares the same project database and the same PUBLIC_URL, so a single key and a single activation cover the entire cluster rather than each container.

Set the license through the LICENSE_KEY environment variable at the service or task level so that every replica inherits the same value automatically. New containers added by autoscaling pick up the license on start with no manual setup or per-container retrieval. See Replicas and Horizontal Scaling for more detail.

Continuous Integration and Ephemeral Environments

Fully ephemeral CI pipelines can run with an OIG license without using up its activations. A pipeline run that creates Directus and its database from scratch generates a new project and a new binding, but that activation starts in a pending state for 24 hours. Pending activations do not count toward your 5, so parallel runs never hit the activation limit. If the instance is gone when the 24 hours end, its activation never counts.

An instance that is still active after 24 hours, or becomes active again later, consumes an activation. If your pipeline keeps instances around longer than that, keep it to a single activation with one of the following approaches:

• Reuse the same database and PUBLIC_URL across runs. If runs share a persistent project database and a constant PUBLIC_URL, they reuse a single binding and consume only one activation in total.
• Validate against a stable instance. Point feature tests at a long-lived dev or staging instance that holds its own activation, instead of keeping a fresh licensed instance per run.

Restoring Database Dumps

Dumping a database and restoring it elsewhere (for example, copying production into a local or dev environment) is a common workflow, and how it interacts with your license depends entirely on the PUBLIC_URL of the instance you restore into.

A dump carries the project's license binding with it. What happens on the next boot is:

• Restoring into the same environment (same project and same PUBLIC_URL, such as recovering a backup of production back onto production) revalidates the existing binding. It does not create a new activation, so restoring a backup into its own environment is free.
• Restoring into a different environment (a different PUBLIC_URL, such as production into local) does not match the original binding. The instance still starts as licensed and keeps running while its current validation holds, but because it cannot revalidate under the new URL, it eventually falls back to the core tier once that validation expires.

If you want a long-lived local or secondary copy running at the full tier, dedicate one of your 5 activations to it and activate the license under that environment's own PUBLIC_URL. Always restore into the same PUBLIC_URL for that environment. Changing the URL on each restore registers a new binding every time and consumes additional activations.

Next Steps

• Licensing overview for license keys, statuses, and the deactivation flow.
• Telemetry for what usage data Directus collects.
• PUBLIC_URL configuration for setting the value that licensing binds to.
• OIG FAQ and OIG terms for the full program details.