Free to build on. Fair to grow on.
BackWave (the complete background-job engine) is free to use for everyone, forever. BackWave Pro adds Workflows on top, and is free for organizations under $1M in annual revenue. Above that, Pro needs a license. Reliability is never paywalled.
BackWave
Free for everyone
The full engine: enqueue, schedule, retries, dead-lettering, every storage adapter, and the dashboard. No revenue threshold, no seat counting, no expiry. Source-available under the PolyForm Shield License.
BackWave ProPro
Free under $1M revenue · licensed above
Adds Workflows: multi-job graphs that run in dependency order, a live graph view, and whole-workflow cancel, retry, and restart. Same binaries whether free or paid: a license changes price only, never features.
What’s free, and what’s Pro
Pro features sit above the reliability boundary: orchestration and operational governance whose value scales with company size. The core reliability primitives are free forever and never paywalled.
| Capability | Tier |
|---|---|
| Enqueue, schedule, and recurring jobs | Free |
| Retries, dead-letter queue & management | Free |
| Single-job in-place retry (operator action) | Free |
| All storage adapters (Postgres, SQL Server, SQLite) + EF Core transactional enqueue | Free |
| Weighted queues and per-queue limits | Free |
| Dashboard: jobs, schedules, failures, dead-letter | Free |
| Workflows: author, enqueue, append | Pro |
| Workflow graph view in the dashboard | Pro |
| Workflow cancel (whole-graph) | Pro |
| Workflow-scoped retry (all / failed / failed + dependents) & restart | Pro |
How the Pro license works
Enforcement is built to stay out of your way. It is a signed key you drop in, not a gate that can take you down.
Offline, no phone-home
The key is verified against a public key embedded in the package. No network call at startup or runtime, and no telemetry, ever. Air-gapped and regulated shops are first-class.
Subscription: annual
Pro is a subscription: an active subscription is required to use it. When it lapses, the software keeps running in full and shows the reminder banner (never a kill-switch), and you renew or stop. There is no perpetual fallback to an old version.
Per-company, unlimited deployments
One key covers your whole organization and any number of deployments. No per-seat, per-node, or per-server activation.
Always soft-fail
A missing, malformed, or out-of-term license produces exactly two things: one startup log warning and a dashboard banner. Features never change. Nothing is ever disabled and nothing throws.
Frequently asked
- What happens when a Pro subscription lapses?
- Nothing crashes. Pro is soft-fail: the software keeps running in full and never throws, with no kill-switch and no phone-home. The only change is a reminder. Once your subscription ends, the dashboard shows a banner and a startup log line appears. Pro is a subscription, so an active subscription is required to keep using it; there is no perpetual fallback to an older version, and you renew or stop.
- Does BackWave phone home or send telemetry?
- No. License checks are 100% offline. There is no network call at startup or runtime and no license or usage telemetry. A Pro license key is verified against a public key embedded in the package.
- What if I run Pro unlicensed?
- Everything works. You see one startup log line and a dashboard banner, and nothing else changes. No feature is disabled and nothing throws. This is the honor system for organizations under $1M in revenue, and a grace reminder for everyone else.
- Can we evaluate Pro before buying?
- Yes, at any company size, without talking to us. Development, testing, evaluation, staging, and CI use of Pro is free for everyone regardless of revenue, with no license key required. A paid license (or the under-$1M free grant) is only needed for production use.
- How is the $1M revenue threshold measured?
- You self-report it. The software cannot and does not detect your revenue. Organizations under $1M in annual gross revenue may use Pro free of charge; at or above that, a paid, revenue-banded license is required. The band sets price only. Every band gets identical features.
- Does a license include support?
- No. No license, free or paid, includes support or maintenance, and the software is provided as-is. What a Pro license buys is the permission to run Pro in production, nothing else. Bug reports and feature requests go to the public issue tracker, which is the same tracker for free and paid users.
- Is BackWave open source?
- It is source-available, not open source. The full source is published on GitHub, and you can read, build, and modify it. The free base packages use the PolyForm Shield License 1.0.0, and Pro uses a commercial license. The Shield license adds a no-compete term, so BackWave is source-available rather than OSI open source.
Read the full terms
Both agreements ship inside their NuGet packages and are published here in full. Pricing is revenue-banded and published on the pricing page.