Licence statement

The plugins are GPL#

Every Subset plugin — the free versions on WordPress.org and the Pro add-ons — is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. That is not a concession we make reluctantly because WordPress requires it. It is the basis the business is built on, and this page exists because most plugin shops in this market are vague about it.

Under that licence, for any Subset plugin you have:

• the right to run it, on as many sites as you like, forever;
• the right to read the source, all of it, with no obfuscation and no encoded files;
• the right to modify it, including removing anything you dislike;
• the right to redistribute it, modified or not, under the same licence.

We cannot take any of those away, we have not tried to, and nothing you buy from us is permission to do them. You already have it.

So what are we selling#

Three things, none of which is the code:

Updates. Writing the next version, testing it against new WordPress releases, and delivering it to your admin screen is ongoing work with an ongoing cost. A licence pays for the delivery of that work while it is active.

Support. A person reading your question and answering it.

Hosted services. Things that run on our infrastructure and cost us money per use — today that means the AI credits described on the hosted AI credits page. A provider bill is a real marginal cost and is the clearest possible case of something worth charging for.

A licence key is a credential for those three services. It is not a key that unlocks the plugin, because there is no lock.

What that means when a licence ends#

Nothing happens to your site.

This is the most common question and the most commonly fudged answer in this industry, so to be unambiguous: when a Subset licence expires, is refunded, is cancelled, or fails a check because our API is down, the plugin keeps doing what it was doing. Every feature stays on. No file is removed, no setting is reverted, no capability is downgraded and no notice appears in your dashboard.

The licensing client on your site caches its last good answer and fails open: a network error, a timeout, or our API being down leaves the plugin running normally rather than switching to a degraded mode. That is deliberate and it is the single most important rule in the codebase — a licensing system whose outage breaks customer sites is a worse product than no licensing system.

Why we do not lock Pro features behind a check#

We could. Plenty do: a if (! valid_license()) return; around each Pro feature, and your site changes behaviour on our say-so.

We think that is a bad trade for both sides. For you, it means our infrastructure is a dependency of your site’s behaviour, which is a risk you did not agree to take on. For us, it means every outage is a customer emergency, every false negative is a support ticket, and the pressure to make the check more aggressive never stops. The honest version — sell the updates, let the code run — is simpler to build and simpler to defend.

It also happens to be what the licence already requires. A GPL plugin that disables itself on a licence check is a GPL plugin with an extra restriction, and the restriction is not enforceable against anybody who reads the code.

What you may and may not do with a licence key#

The code is free; the key is not the code. So:

• You may copy, modify and redistribute any Subset plugin, including a Pro one, as the GPL allows.
• You may run a modified copy on your own or your clients’ sites with no licence at all.
• You may not share or resell a licence key, or use one to supply updates to sites outside your own control. That is a restriction on a service credential, not on software, and it is the same distinction as sharing a password.

If you redistribute a Pro plugin, the recipient has the same rights you do and no entitlement to our updates. That is the arrangement working as intended.

Third-party code#

The plugins include third-party libraries under their own licences, each of which is compatible with the GPL and listed in the source. Our build does not bundle anything whose licence we cannot comply with, and this paragraph will name the significant ones once the first release exists to name them from.

The site, the dashboard and the API in this repository are a different matter: that is our own code, it is not part of a distributed plugin, and it is not covered by the plugins’ licence.

The full licence text#

The GPL text ships inside every plugin, in the file every WordPress plugin puts it in. Its canonical copy lives at gnu.org (opens in a new tab).

Where anything on this page appears to contradict the GPL, the GPL is right and this page is wrong, and we would like to hear about it — the source repository (opens in a new tab) is public and the issue tracker is where that conversation belongs.