Introducing Dragonfly Enterprise
Dragonfly is moving from BSL 1.1 to a source-available license with v2.1. Dragonfly Enterprise is free in production up to 100 vCPUs. Here’s why.
November 4, 2026
Until today, Dragonfly was released under the Business Source License (BSL 1.1). Today we are launching Dragonfly Enterprise. It is the continuation of Dragonfly, starting with version 2.1, and it is released under a new source-available license.
Dragonfly Enterprise is free for production use up to 100 vCPUs. Above that, you need a commercial license. All future development of Dragonfly happens in Dragonfly Enterprise.
This is a business decision, and I want to explain it plainly.
Why we're doing this
Dragonfly is a business. We are a venture-backed startup with one mission: accelerate data at scale. That mission takes a full-time engineering team working on hard problems for years. How much innovation we can put into Dragonfly depends directly on the success of our business.
BSL put us in conflict with ourselves. Under BSL, anyone could self-host Dragonfly at any scale for free. Our revenue came mostly from Dragonfly Cloud, our managed service. So every time we built something big, we had to ask whether it belonged in Dragonfly or only in Dragonfly Cloud. Shipping it to everyone often meant competing with our own product. Our Kubernetes operator is an example: we built it for a single shard and never for a cluster. I don't like having that question on the table. Users expect a consistent, great experience whatever tier or environment they're on.
The biggest users get the most value. We see companies run Dragonfly on clusters at a scale that wasn't possible with the alternatives. They get reliability at that scale, and they spend less on hardware and on operations. That value is real and measurable. Companies getting it at that scale should share part of it back, so we can keep making Dragonfly stronger.
This aligns our interests. With Dragonfly Enterprise, revenue comes from large production deployments, wherever they run: in our cloud or in yours. That removes the conflict. We can put our best work into Dragonfly Enterprise, and everyone benefits from it, including free-tier users.
What is Dragonfly Enterprise
Dragonfly Enterprise is the continuation of the Dragonfly project that we have been building, in the open, on Github for the past four years. Starting with release 2.1 going forward, all enterprise and production features will be shipping to this project. In the coming versions we will ship several enterprise features that we previously held back. To name a few we plan to introduce AOF persistence, MCP support, and new data types for SSD tiering. Most importantly, Dragonfly Enterprise lets us ship everything we build into one product, with no conflict of interest.
What's changing
Dragonfly Enterprise starts at version 2.1. Dragonfly releases before 2.1 stay under BSL 1.1 on their existing terms. New features, fixes and releases ship in Dragonfly Enterprise.
Dragonfly Enterprise | Up to 100 vCPUs in production | Above 100 vCPUs in production |
|---|---|---|
Use in production | Free | Commercial license |
Development, testing, staging, CI | Free, no limit | Free, no limit |
Read and modify the source | Yes | Yes |
Offer it as a database or cache product or service | No | No |
The main points:
- Only production counts. Dev, test, staging and other non-production environments are free at any size.
- The limit is 100 vCPUs total. It counts all production instances running at the same time across your company and its affiliates. Replicas, standbys and failover instances count too.
- Above 100 vCPUs, you need a commercial license. Contact us and we'll work it out with you.
- Dragonfly Enterprise reports usage. Each build sends basic telemetry: the Dragonfly version, the number of threads and the total memory provisioned. It never includes any of the data you store. You can see exactly what is sent in the source: https://github.com/dragonflydb/dragonfly/blob/main/src/server/version_monitor.cc. Running air-gapped, or behind a firewall that routinely blocks outbound requests, doesn't violate the license.
- Dragonfly Cloud is unchanged. If you use our managed service, nothing changes for you.
Why a free tier
Most Dragonfly users will never need to pay, and that is deliberate.
Developers, startups and most production teams run well under 100 vCPUs. We want them on Dragonfly. They give us feedback, find bugs, write integrations and bring Dragonfly into new companies. If they prefer to self-host, they can. If they want a managed service, they can use Dragonfly Cloud.
100 vCPUs in production is a serious deployment. If you are above it, Dragonfly is running a core part of your business, and the savings in hardware and operations are significant. Paying for it is a fair trade at that point.
Why now
Dragonfly is mature. We now see production clusters far larger than when we chose BSL, and they run critical workloads. The value at the high end is clear, and so is the gap between who gets that value and who pays for building it.
We also have a roadmap of major work ahead. I want all of it in Dragonfly Enterprise, not split between self-hosted Dragonfly and Dragonfly Cloud. Launching Dragonfly Enterprise now, at 2.1, lets us do that from this day forward.
FAQ
What is Dragonfly Enterprise? It is the next version of Dragonfly, starting at 2.1. It is the same codebase, built by the same team.
What happens to Dragonfly under BSL? Releases before 2.1 keep their BSL 1.1 terms, and you can keep running them. New features and fixes ship in Dragonfly Enterprise.
I run Dragonfly in production on fewer than 100 vCPUs. Do I need to do anything? No. You can upgrade to Dragonfly Enterprise and keep using it for free.
How do you count vCPUs? Add up the vCPUs provisioned for Dragonfly across all of your production Dragonfly Enterprise instances running at the same time, including replicas, standbys and failover instances. On Kubernetes, for example, count the vCPUs provisioned for the Dragonfly pods. To check, look at the io_threads value on the /metrics page. Dragonfly also writes it to the info log at startup.
What counts as production? Any instance that stores, serves or processes data for live users, customers or your business operations. What you call the environment doesn't matter. Dev, test, staging and CI are not production.
My company has several teams or subsidiaries running Dragonfly. Is the limit per team? No. The limit covers your company and its affiliates together.
I'm above 100 vCPUs. What do I need to do? To run Dragonfly Enterprise above the limit, you need a commercial license. Contact us and we'll find a plan that fits.
Does this change anything for Dragonfly Cloud customers? No.
Can I modify Dragonfly Enterprise? Yes, under the same license and limits. You can't remove or disable the usage reporting, and you can't offer it, modified or not, as a standalone database or cache product or service.
Can I offer Dragonfly Enterprise as a managed service? No. That stays restricted, as it was under BSL.
What does usage reporting send? Only details about your environment, never your data. Today that is one HTTPS request to version.dragonflydb.io, 30 seconds after startup and then every 24 hours, carrying the Dragonfly version, CPU architecture, I/O backend, cloud and deployment type (for example k8s or docker), kernel version, thread count, uptime, a memory-limit range rather than the exact value, and whether the instance is a master or a replica. The exact fields may change over time, but they will always describe your environment and will never include the data you store. If you run air-gapped, or behind a firewall that routinely blocks outbound requests, you are not in breach of the license.
Is Dragonfly Enterprise open source? No. Dragonfly has been source available from day one; it was never OSI open source. The source of Dragonfly Enterprise is public, and you can read, build, modify and run it within the license terms.
Will you change the license again? We have no plans to.
What's next
For almost everyone using Dragonfly, Dragonfly Enterprise is free and works the same. For our largest users, the license now matches the value they get. For us, the conflict between Dragonfly and Dragonfly Cloud is gone. We can ship our best work to Dragonfly Enterprise.
Our commitment to building the fastest, most efficient database hasn't changed - we're just aligning our model to support long-term innovation. If you have questions about licensing or upgrading, don't hesitate to reach out at info@dragonflydb.io. If your team requires a commercial license, speak to sales today.
Oded Poncz CEO, Dragonfly
