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. Free-use 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 and support, 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) | 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: monthly or 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.
- Is BackWave open source?
- No. Both tiers ship as closed, binary NuGet packages under a free-use license (base) and a commercial license (Pro). The source is not published. It is a free-use base plus a revenue-gated paid tier. It is not open source or source-available, and it is not dual licensing.
Read the full terms
Both agreements ship inside their NuGet packages and are published here in full. Pricing is revenue-banded; for a quote or to buy a Pro license, get in touch.