Here is everything you need to know about using MongoDB Community Edition for your business. MongoDB Community Edition is free for commercial use.
If you are building a startup, a side hustle that hopes to become a business, or an internal enterprise tool, you have likely asked this question: "Can I use the free version of MongoDB to run my actual business, or do I need to pay for Enterprise?" is mongodb community edition free for commercial use
Under the SSPL, if you distribute MongoDB as part of your commercial software, you must make the entire source code of your software available under the SSPL (or a compatible license). Unless you want to open source your $5,000/month backup tool, you cannot embed MongoDB Community Edition inside a commercial product you ship to customers. Here is everything you need to know about
MongoDB used to be licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3). The AGPL was strong: if you modified MongoDB itself and offered it as a service to the public, you had to release your source code. However, a loophole existed. Large cloud providers (AWS, IBM, etc.) could take vanilla MongoDB, wrap it in their own management layer, and sell "MongoDB as a Service" without contributing anything back to MongoDB, Inc. Unless you want to open source your $5,000/month
You can download it, install it on your own servers (or a VM), and build a multi-million dollar business on top of it without paying MongoDB, Inc. a single cent. You do not need a commercial license to sell a product that uses MongoDB as its backend.
If you need an embedded database for a commercial desktop app or on-prem appliance, you should look at SQLite, RocksDB, or LevelDB. Or, you need to buy a commercial license from MongoDB. Assuming you are in Scenario A (standard SaaS/web app) and are safe to use Community Edition, what are you missing versus the paid Enterprise edition? You need to know this before you scale.
Let’s say you build a backup software. You decide to use MongoDB as the internal storage engine for your backup catalog. You ship your software to clients (Docker container or binary) that includes a full MongoDB binary inside it.