Open Source at xyflow

Open source since the beginning

We gave the React Flow library an MIT license as soon as we built it in 2019. We were lucky to see it organically grow from there, and as more people and organizations used it, we wanted to spend more time taking care of the library and its ecosystem. In 2022, we set up a business model to support our ongoing work on the library and put our agency-style work to the side to focus on the library full-time. Since then, we've been happy maintainers of one of the most popular node-based UI libraries.

We've also released Svelte Flow and our Pro Platform under an MIT License in the meantime, and you can expect the same from any projects in the future.

We'll keep our software MIT Licensed forever

We chose the MIT License because we believe in Free and Open Source Software. Having this license means that anyone can use, repurpose, or resell our docs, our blog posts, or our library. We love that it allows anyone to use xyflow for their own projects, and we get to see people build things with xyflow that we never would have imagined. The MIT License also allows companies to easily use the library without having to hire a lawyer to interpret a custom license. We'll keep our software MIT Licensed forever.

How we fund our work

We need funding to pay for the time it takes to care for xyflow and the infrastructure around it. The way we do this is a thin-crust open-core model:

We spend most of our time on the “core,” which is MIT Licensed (library, docs, github discussions, discord). We spend less time on the “crust,” which is the paid content and services (subscriber support, pro examples)– these are handled by our Terms of Use instead of the MIT License. This model allows us to decide the direction of the library (no investors), the core library remains free for everyone, and the financial burden of the library and ecosystem around it is placed on organizations who can afford to fund us (rather than individual developers).

Supporting the open source ecosystem

We give back to the Open Source projects that we use ourselves on Open Collective and Github.

We offer free access to our Pro examples to non-commercial open source projects and students who use xyflow. If this is you, send us an email to [email protected] from your student email, or send us a link to your open source project repository.

We want to share our learnings whenever we can. We conducted a survey with React Flow developers in 2023, and we shared the results publicly in an interactive React Flow app and in a full-length blog post.