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 01.03.2026
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 prices from 35 francs a month for Basic to 119 francs for Ultimate.
The local application does not need the cloud. It is complete without it, and that is the commitment that matters.
Built clean, without anyone else’s code
TILL is clean room. What we know about Swiss accounting software comes from public API documentation and from the owner using his own accounts. No code, no UI assets, no trade dress from anybody else.
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 not public yet
As of July 2026
There is no public repository today, and we will not link one that only exists later. A link to a 404 is worse than no link.
The code opens when the ledger is real: when TILL can keep books somebody would actually file. A repository you cannot usefully run costs trust rather than building it.
The licence is settled independently of that. MIT is decided, not held out as a prospect.
Follow where this goes.