A zero licence fee is one line of six. Here is which line.
The phrase gets used loosely in this market, often to mean something that is not quite what it sounds like. This page sets out precisely what a HK$0 licence fee covers in our case, what it explicitly does not cover, and the questions that tell you whether another vendor’s zero-fee offer means the same thing.
Key facts about zero licence fee
- What is zero
- The platform licence for all six modules: HK$0, with no per-seat, per-module or annual renewal charge.
- What is not zero
- Hosting, deployment and configuration, integration, migration, content development, and maintenance and operations. All six are real costs.
- Source code
- Yours under GPL, including customisations we build for you. No escrow arrangement needed because there is nothing to escrow.
- The trap to avoid
- A "free" open-source LMS that requires a paid authoring tool, a paid hosting tier or a paid support contract to be usable is not free. Ask which.
- Our position
- We do not want a customer who believed the whole thing was free. That customer is a bad fit for us and a bad experience for them.
What zero licence fee does and does not mean
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is there a per-seat charge? | No. The number of users does not change the licence fee. |
| Is there an annual renewal? | No. There is nothing to renew, because nothing is licensed to you in the first place. |
| Do I pay for course authoring software? | No authoring licence. Courses are authored in the browser, and the open interactive content formats have no per-item authoring cost. |
| Do I pay for hosting? | Yes. Servers, databases, backups, storage and bandwidth are infrastructure costs whoever provides them. We can host it, or you can. |
| Do I pay for implementation? | Yes. Someone has to configure the system to your processes. That is a service, not a licence. |
| Do I pay for support? | Only if you want it. You can run it yourselves with the documentation, and the code is yours to hand to whoever you like. |
| Do I pay to upgrade? | No. Upgrades to new upstream releases are part of the open-source model. |
| Is there a catch? | The catch is that the work moves to you or to a partner. That is a real cost, and we put it in the six lines rather than hide it in a licence fee. |
No rows match your filter.
How to test any zero-licence-fee claim
Ask four questions in writing: (1) Is the per-seat charge genuinely zero, or is it bundled into a different line? (2) Which hosted authoring or content tool do I need a paid licence for? (3) What is the total cost in year one, and what changes in year three? (4) If I stopped paying you tomorrow, what would I still own, and what would I still need? A vendor with a genuine zero-licence product answers all four directly. A vendor with a "free" tier that needs paid add-ons does not.
Who this suits, and who it does not
Organisations with technical capacity or a technical partner
If you have someone who can run a Linux server, or a partner who will, the zero licence fee converts directly into money kept over three to five years. The work still has to be done, but you are buying it once instead of renting it annually.
Organisations that need to own their data and their customisation
The strongest structural argument for open source is not price, it is ownership. When the platform licence is zero, nothing in the architecture depends on a commercial relationship continuing. That matters for regulated training records, for groups being restructured, and for organisations that may be acquired.
Small organisations with no technical capacity
A one-person HR team that needs a working system in three weeks will pay more in configuration time than a commercial licence would have cost. We would rather say this plainly at the start than discover it in month six of a project.
Two honest caveats
What zero does not fix
- The cost of implementation does not go away — it moves
- Out-of-the-box polish is lower than the best commercial products
- Some capabilities need configuration work before they are usable
- You need a maintenance plan, even if nobody invoices you for it
- Legacy content often needs re-authoring, not just moving
What zero genuinely fixes
- The annual renewal conversation disappears
- The number of users stops being a pricing factor
- Data and customisation are yours throughout, not only on exit
- Upgrades are free and the roadmap is upstream, not commercial
- Budget predictability improves across years
Questions about zero-cost open source
Why do you give the platform away?
Because the platform is not where we make money. Our work is custom courseware development and scoped implementation. Licensing the platform to you for nothing keeps the relationship in the area where we are genuinely useful, and it removes a procurement objection that is often the main reason a project stalls.
If the platform is free, what are you actually selling?
Three things: custom courseware built to your content and assessment design; implementation and configuration; and optional managed operations. None of these are hidden inside a licence fee, because there is no licence fee.
Is the source code really mine?
Yes, under the GPL, including anything we customise for you. If we ever stop working together, you keep the code, the configuration and the data. We do not use proprietary modules to create a switching cost.
Is there a paid version?
There is no paid licence tier. Paid engagements are services — scoped work with deliverables, not a feature gate on the platform. The module set is the same for everyone.
Will this really be cheaper in three years?
For larger organisations with technical capability, usually yes, and the calculator on this site will let you test that with your own numbers. For a small organisation with no technical capacity, it may not be. We publish the model rather than a claim precisely because the answer depends on your situation.
What if we need something you have not built?
Then it is custom work, quoted as a scoped deliverable. We will tell you whether it is better to build on the open-source stack, to use an existing third-party component, or to do something simpler. Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need the feature.
Check whether zero actually helps you
Put your own numbers into the six-line model. If the answer is that a commercial licence suits you better, we will tell you that too.