Community Grant Program

From the size of your deployment on September 29, 2026. We take your device count, your production server count, and any branding you had already changed, and grant you all of it — plus 10% extra device headroom.

A device is each individual unit you monitor or control — not a tag, a data point, or a platform record — whether it connects directly or through a gateway. 200 meters reporting through one gateway are 200 devices; the gateway counts only if it reports data of its own.

Your granted capacity is your device count on September 29, 2026 plus 10%, rounded up to the next 10 devices. The extra is at least 10 devices and never more than 1,000, and every grant covers at least 100 devices in total.

• 30 devices → 100 granted (minimum applies)
• 104 devices → 124 granted (headroom 20)
• 500 devices → 550 granted (headroom 50)
• 3,268 devices → 3,598 granted (headroom 330)
• 15,000 devices → 16,000 granted (headroom capped at 1,000)

Counting is per deployment, not per organization. Your capacity is calculated once, at registration, and does not grow with your deployment.

One running ThingsBoard server process that serves your business. If you run ThingsBoard on a single machine, that is one. If you run several for high availability or scale, each one counts.

Registration reads this number from your deployment, so you do not need to work it out yourself. Unlike devices, production servers receive no extra headroom — you keep exactly what you were already running.

Your grant does not change. It is based on the deployment you were running before September 29, 2026, not on how many devices are connected today.

Only those that existed before September 29, 2026. You can register any time before the deadline, but anything added after that date is not part of your grant.

Yes. Your grant covers 4.4 and every later release, for as long as you stay within your granted capacity, at no cost. There is never a maintenance fee on your grant.

Your grant includes 5M AI tokens for the platform’s built-in AI features, granted once when you register rather than renewed each period.

When they run out, buy more the same way any perpetual license holder does. The AI features stay available; only the tokens are consumed.

Community Support is included with your grant at no charge: public documentation and community forums, with no guaranteed response times.

Purchase of Professional Pack includes the first year of maintenance, which gives you Help Desk access — our official support channel. After that first year, Help Desk continues while you keep maintenance renewed.

From inside your deployment. It runs a quick read-only check against your own database; you sign in to the License Portal and accept the Community Grant License Agreement, and your perpetual grant key is issued and stored in your Portal account.

Registration is free and self-service, and for most deployments it takes under a minute. Larger deployments may need a short additional review.

No. The check produces one small encrypted report with structural information only — entity counts, creation timestamps, table sizes, and your deployment's identifiers. It never includes telemetry values, device names, or dashboard contents, and you never upload your database.

There is an offline path: download the read-only reporting tool from the License Portal on any connected machine, run it against your deployment, and submit the encrypted report through the Portal yourself. If anything in that is unclear, contact us and we will walk you through it.

Yes, and it has to be that way round. The key issued at registration is what licenses 4.4, and registration runs from inside a 4.3 deployment — so there is no path that upgrades first.

Once the key is in your Portal account you can upgrade whenever you are ready. See how to register your deployment.

Tell us. Genuine mistakes get corrected — the process is built to protect honest users, not to catch them out. Registration reads your numbers from your own database, so there is nothing to fill in wrongly. Tampering with that database to inflate what it reports, or altering your deployment history, violates the license terms: it voids the grant from the start and makes standard commercial fees payable for the whole period.

Nothing you can see. Your deployment runs under your Community Grant, with the same devices, the same production servers, and the same branding you had before.

One thing to plan for: if you have local modifications to the source code, nothing of yours disappears — but after the upgrade you re-apply them to the new version yourself. If that looks difficult, contact us and we will help you work through it.

Yes. Your grant is tied to your deployment, not to the machine it runs on. Moving to new hardware or a new hosting provider, restoring from a backup, or replacing a production server all leave your grant untouched — including any branding covered by it. You only pay when you add a production server beyond your granted count, not when you replace one.

If you are planning a migration or a restore, contact us beforehand and we will confirm your license stays linked to the deployment.

Contact us first. Each grant covers one deployment, and two grants cannot be added together into a single larger one — so merging without planning it can leave you with less capacity than you had across both. Tell us your target structure, and we will work out the approach that keeps as much of your granted capacity as possible.

Nothing breaks. Existing devices, data, and services keep running normally; new devices above your capacity are simply not added, and the platform shows a prompt to increase your licensed capacity.

You can add devices yourself, at any time, straight from the License Portal. It is self-service, it takes effect immediately, and nothing about your running solution stops while you do it. Devices are sold individually at up to 1 USD each, and the price per device goes down as the volume grows.

On a standard key, yes. The platform checks in with our license server periodically and tolerates interruptions of up to 48 hours. After that, it shuts down until the next successful check. Nothing is deleted, and it comes back as soon as the connection does. Contact us if your deployment can only run without external connectivity.

No. It is perpetual and free. There are no renewal fees, subscription fees, or maintenance fees on the capacity your grant covers, and we will never ask you for back payment or fees for past use.

Three things, independently of each other: more device capacity, production servers, or the Professional Pack. You need them only if you grow beyond your granted capacity or want capabilities your grant does not include.

Extra capacity is a one-time perpetual purchase, not a subscription, and your Community Grant license stays in place when you buy it. Devices are sold individually at up to 1 USD each, with the price per device going down as the volume grows.

Professional Pack is an optional add-on available only to Community Grant participants. In a single one-time payment it unlocks every remaining feature of the platform — everything your grant does not already include, such as integrations, the scheduler, reporting, and the white-labeling features that manage branding from the interface without modifying the source code. It is defined by what it adds to your grant rather than by a fixed list, so it covers new capabilities as they ship.

The first year of maintenance is included, so you also get Help Desk access — first response within one business day for an issue preventing production use, two business days otherwise.

A flat 2,999 USD, once, per deployment, whatever its size. It is not time-limited, so you can buy it whenever you need it, and it does not change your granted capacity.

Your grant already includes everything the former Community Edition had, plus the advanced security features that used to be Professional Edition only: fine-grained RBAC, SSO and OAuth2, and Secrets Storage.

Free License keys and Community Grants depend on the declarations you make being truthful and accurate — your non-commercial status, your device count, and who your Organization is.

Honest mistakes are fixable: contact us and we'll help you correct your registration or move to the right license. A false, deceptive, or manipulated declaration is different — it is a material breach of our Terms of Use, and it voids the no-charge permission from the start, so the use counts as unlicensed and standard commercial fees then apply retroactively for the whole period, alongside any other remedy available to us.

If your setup, architecture, or Organization doesn't fit the standard declarations cleanly, don't guess — contact us first and we'll clarify or arrange custom terms before you register.

Only if you buy something, and even then it is optional. The first year of maintenance is included in the price of any purchase. From the second year onward it costs 17% per year of what you paid — for the Professional Pack on its own, that is 510 USD.

Maintenance covers source code updates and Help Desk support for the paid parts of your license. It never applies to your Community Grant. If you do not renew, your deployment keeps running and you keep everything you bought; you simply stop receiving source updates and Help Desk support until you renew.

Yes, at any time, at no charge, with no penalty and no deadline. Bring your deployment back within your granted capacity, stop using the capabilities your grant does not cover, and tell us — we reissue your key at granted scope. You never lose the capacity your grant protects.

You keep it, free, at your granted scale, with no back payment and no relicensing fee. You continue maintaining it the way you always have: re-applying your changes to each new version's source.

Yes, through the Professional Pack. That gives you both the right to remove or replace ThingsBoard branding and the built-in white-labeling feature, which manages branding without touching the source code. Under the grant alone, the default branding and the “Powered by ThingsBoard” badge stay in place.

White-labeling is licensed per deployment, not per device, so your branding choice never increases the cost of growth.

Each deployment is treated separately. One that was already rebranded before September 29, 2026 keeps its branding under its own grant. One that still shows ThingsBoard branding does not gain the right to remove it — that comes with the Professional Pack for that deployment.

Yes, indefinitely. Every Community Edition release published before 4.4 stays under Apache 2.0 permanently, and no license or key is ever needed for it. Community Edition 4.3 LTS receives security updates until July 20, 2027, and 4.2 LTS until February 15, 2027. After those dates, the versions keep running but no longer receive official fixes.

From 4.4 onward, the unified platform is licensed under the Business Source License 1.1. The source stays public: you can read, build, modify, fork, and redistribute it, and use it freely for development and testing. Production use is free within the Free License limits. And every release automatically becomes Apache 2.0 four years after it ships.

• September 29, 2026 — registration opens, and this is the date your deployment size is measured against.
• February 15, 2027 — 4.2 LTS stops receiving security updates.
• July 20, 2027 — registration closes, 4.3 LTS stops receiving security updates, and grandfathered branding rights can no longer be registered.

There is no advantage to waiting, and no advantage to rushing: your grant is calculated from September 29, 2026 either way.

You can no longer get a grant. Registration closes on July 20, 2027, and after that the route to a free perpetual key is shut: moving to 4.4 or later means buying a commercial license, like any other new deployment. That is the reason to register before the date rather than after it.

Your existing versions are unaffected either way: every release published before 4.4 stays under Apache 2.0 permanently, so nothing you run today stops working.

If you have already registered, the deadline does not affect you at all. You can buy the Professional Pack, add capacity, or go back to your grant at any point afterwards, with no re-registration.