BackWave is free. Pro is the only thing you pay for.
The complete engine is free for every organization at any size, with no key to install and nothing that expires. BackWave Pro adds advanced capabilities like Workflows and is the only part you would pay for.
BackWave — free for everyone
The complete engine: typed jobs, cron schedules, retries, dead-letter queue and management, every storage adapter, and the full dashboard. Ships source-available under the PolyForm Shield License, with no revenue threshold at any size.
BackWave Pro — what the band prices
Workflows: multi-job dependency graphs, the live graph view, and whole-workflow cancel, retry, and restart. Identical in every band. A higher band changes the price, not the features.
What does Pro cost?
BackWave Pro is priced by your organization's annual gross revenue, self-reported on your honor. The software never measures it. Answer the question, see your price.
What's your organization's annual revenue?
Your BackWave Pro price
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Select your revenue band to see your price.
Not sure which side of a line you're on? Revenue is aggregated across your affiliates and assessed at purchase and each renewal. If you grow past a boundary mid-term, nothing changes until you renew. Full terms →
What never changes
Every band gets identical features
A band sets price, never capability. There are no gated add-ons and no enterprise edition, and no license includes support. The $400 binaries and the $7,500 binaries are the same binaries.
Your price is locked while you stay subscribed
The price sheet you sign up on is yours for as long as your subscription stays active. List prices can change for new customers; they never change under you.
Re-banded only at renewal
Outgrow your band mid-term? Congratulations. Nothing changes until your next renewal, when you re-report revenue and the new band applies.
One key a year, verified offline
Billing is annual, so your ops team touches a license key once a year. The key is verified against a public key embedded in the package. Nothing phones home and there is no telemetry.
Soft-fail, always
A missing or expired key produces one startup log line and a dashboard banner. Nothing is ever disabled, nothing throws, and your queue never stops.
Evaluation is free for everyone
Development, testing, staging, and CI use of Pro is free at any company size. You only need a production license.
Coming from Hangfire?
- Storage adapters: postgres, sql server, and sqlite — plus ef core transactional enqueue — all free; hangfire gates storage options behind paid tiers (from $500/yr)
- Dead-letter queue & management: included free, with operator actions in the dashboard; not a first-class free feature elsewhere
- When a license lapses: a banner. the software keeps running in full; enforcement varies elsewhere, and backwave is the only one that promises soft-fail in the license text