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How licensing works
Licensing
The short version: our tools are not free software, but several of them are free to use. Which one applies to you depends on a single question — whether the thing you are building is something you sell.
This page is a summary, written to be read. The documents that actually bind are your licence agreement, the Terms of Use and the Fair Usage Policy. Where this page and those disagree, they win. If your case is not obviously covered below, ask us — we would far rather answer a question than have you guess.
Free to use, for non-commercial work
fxTeX and fxEditor — and the CKEditor, TinyMCE and other plugins built on them — are free to use in non-commercial applications. A personal site, a course, a research group's pages, a departmental wiki, a hobby project: use them, with nothing to pay.
What non-commercial excludes is narrower than people often assume, so it is worth stating directly. You may not use the free products inside a derivative product that you sell, or charge for access to. If your users pay you — a licence fee, a subscription, a per-seat charge — and our editor is part of what they are paying for, that is a commercial use and needs a commercial licence.
It is the selling that matters, not the sector. A university does not become commercial by being large, and a company's internal-only documentation does not become commercial by belonging to a company. A learning platform that charges schools for access does, even if the schools are not-for-profit.
Equations you generate are yours either way: they can be used for any purpose, anywhere, including commercially. The licence covers the tools, not their output.
With a commercial licence
A commercial licence lets you embed our tools in a product and sell it. There is no territorial restriction, no cap on where or to whom you sell, and no obligation to attribute — subject only to the terms of the licence itself.
That is the whole point of it: you should be able to build on this without having to think about us again. If a term in your licence is getting in the way of something reasonable, tell us.
Product by product
| Product | Non-commercial | Commercial |
|---|---|---|
| fxEditor | Free to use | Licence required |
| Plugins (CKEditor, TinyMCE, …) | Free to use | (inc with fxEditor) |
| fxTeX | Free to use | Free to use |
| fxCalc and fxGraph | Free to use * | Free to use * |
| fxTeX Pro | Licence required | Licence required |
| fxTeX Server (formerly LaTeXRender) | Free for light use * | Licence required |
| fxTeX Server (self-hosted) | Licence required | Licence required |
| fxRender (for Excel) | Licence required | Licence required |
* Subject to fair usage
The hosted rendering service, fxTeX
Server at https://fxtex.codecogs.com (and still at https://latex.codecogs.com), is
the one place a volume limit applies, because every equation is a request to our servers. The
Essential licence covers it for one domain or app; Professional and Enterprise
include it at higher allowances. Converting to MathML in the
browser with fxTeX has no limit at all — it never reaches us, so there
is nothing for us to meter.
Licence keys
A licence comes with a key, fx_pk_…, shown in the
licence manager alongside ready-to-paste examples. What it is used for
depends on the product:
| fxEditor | Activates the editor on your domain, once per page, with EqEditor.init({ licence }) — or the licence option of whichever plugin you use. See Activating with a licence key. |
| fxTeX Pro | Downloads and unlocks your own build. See fxTeX Pro. |
| fxTeX Server | Not needed from a website, which is recognised by its registered domain. An app or a server sends the key with each request instead. See Access and keys. |
| fxTeX | No key. It is free, and never contacts our servers to render. |
A key is safe to put in a web page: it works only on the domain it was issued for, so copying it to another site achieves nothing.
More
Licence options — what each tier includes, and what it costs.
Fair Usage Policy — the limits on our hosted rendering service.
fxTeX Server access — request allowances for each licence.
Terms of Use — the terms covering this website.
Licence agreement — the document a commercial licence is granted under.
Contact us — if your situation is not clearly covered here.