MIT, and it stays that way
The core is MIT licensed. That is a statement about what you may do with it, not a badge.
What the MIT licence permits
Use, copy, modify, redistribute, sell. Commercially and privately. The one condition is that the licence text and the copyright notice travel with it.
What it does not ask of you: you do not have to publish your changes. If you adapt TILL for your company, that adaptation is yours and you owe nobody the code for it.
And it comes without warranty. For software that keeps books that is not a formality: responsibility for your accounts stays with you, and the ten-year retention duty under OR Art. 958f falls on you, not on us.
Why not AGPL
The AGPL requires anyone who offers the software over a network to release the source of their version. For a project that wants exactly that, it is the right choice.
For us it is the wrong one, for a very concrete reason: it forecloses the open-core model we intend to fund this with. A company adapting TILL internally would have to weigh, under AGPL, whether it was taking on a disclosure obligation. Nobody should have to ask that question.
This is a trade-off, not a claim to be better. The AGPL protects user freedom more strongly than MIT does. We picked the licence that puts distribution and a workable business model together, and we would rather say so than dress it up as a matter of principle.
How we intend to make money
bexio prices as of 28.10.2026
The core is free and stays free. The plan is a Swiss-hosted cloud tier later, for teams that do not want to run banking, backups and operations themselves. That is the paid layer.
What it will cost we do not know, because it does not exist. We are not inventing a price here. For a sense of what the market charges today: bexio publishes four plans, Basic to Ultimate, at 35 to 119 francs a month billed yearly (10 francs more billed monthly), excluding MWST.
The local application does not need the cloud. It is complete without it, and that is the commitment that matters.
Built independently, without copying anyone’s product
TILL is built independently. What we know about Swiss accounting software comes from public API documentation and from the owner using his own accounts. Nothing is copied from another product: no code, no UI assets, no trade dress.
That is not a politeness. Copied code would poison an MIT repository: we could no longer grant the licence we grant, and everyone using TILL would have inherited the problem.
The source is public
As of October 2026
The source has been public since 09.09.2026, under MIT, at github.com/tillbooks/tillbooks. The ledger, the Swiss compliance code, the MCP server and the Studio can all be read and run straight from the repository. Not in it yet is the module that makes the EBICS connection to the bank; it will be published under MIT too.
Public does not mean finished. TILL is a public beta: Nomadik GmbH keeps its own books in it, and anyone switching keeps their current program running until the figures match.
The licence is settled independently of that. MIT is decided, not held out as a prospect.
Taking part
Bug reports with steps help most: what you did, what you expected and what happened. Amounts, names, IBANs and account numbers from your books do not belong in a public issue. Questions and ideas go to GitHub Discussions, bugs to an issue on GitHub. An email to hello@tillbooks.ch is just as welcome.
Code is welcome too, under five rules that keep the ledger trustworthy: posted entries are never edited, posting is idempotent, money is integer Rappen, there is one posting path, and no code is copied from anyone else. CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to run TILL and how to send a change. The issues labelled "good first issue" are a good place to start.
Try it with the demo company
TILL is free and runs on your own computer. The demo company lets you look around before any real books go in.