Sustainability

Zensical, our static site generator, is fully Open Source under the MIT license – that's our permanent commitment.

With Zensical, you can write your content in any editor, use any publishing workflow, and host your site anywhere – all with Open Source tools. Zensical Studio is a tool that enhances your authoring and writing experience with Zensical. It includes features such as validation, completions, navigation, syntax awareness, and other workflow improvements inside the editor you're already familiar with. It makes you more productive, but it doesn't change the underlying ownership and portability of your content.

While the editor integrations for Zensical Studio are Open Source, Zensical Studio itself is closed source, licensed under a commercial license.

During the Public Beta, Zensical Studio is free to use, and we commit to keeping a free tier available indefinitely. The Public Beta does not require you to sign up – you can just install Zensical Studio via the Visual Studio Marketplace and start writing in seconds.

If you're using Material for MkDocs and are looking at migrating to Zensical, you can already benefit from using Zensical Studio, as it's compatible with Material for MkDocs, MkDocs, and all of its forks.

Continuity and independence

Future revenue from Zensical Studio enables us to invest in Zensical and grow our team of dedicated professionals to deliver the best-in-class Docs-as-Code authoring experience, per our roadmap.

Before settling on the MIT + commercial license model, we considered a range of alternative options:

1. We have developed software using a sponsorship program in the past¹ and are intimately familiar with the advantages and drawbacks of this approach. Ultimately, this approach does not scale to sustain a team of professionals working on Zensical full-time.

2. Venture capital funding would have ensured sustainability, but only for a time, and with the drawback of giving up independence and accepting that we would need to cater to outside interests in the long-term. Going down this road would have meant exactly what we want to avoid: having to compromise on our key goals to focus on delivering value to our users and building great software.

3. Copyleft licensing is an option we considered but ultimately rejected because the family of GPL licenses makes adoption within companies significantly more difficult. Many companies have outright bans on GPL-licensed software as the legal implications of its use can be difficult to assess.

We chose the licensing model for Zensical and Zensical Studio deliberately and after careful consideration. Zensical is licensed under MIT to give users maximum freedom, including the ability to use it for commercial purposes. Zensical Studio complements this with a commercial license and a closed-source distribution model. This familiar approach lowers adoption friction for professional users while helping us sustainably fund continued development.

The MIT license and Zensical’s use of open formats ensure that projects remain portable and users are never locked in. They can move to alternatives with minimal friction, which gives us a strong incentive to keep Zensical competitive and continuously improve the software.

This model maximizes user value while keeping licensing clear and easy to adopt for both Zensical and Zensical Studio. At the same time, it gives us the resources to build sustainably, with the continuity, resilience, and independence needed to move the project forward.