Licence question (grey area)

[mistersupafly]

Hi,

 

I have a question quite related to this one:

 

The scenario is the following:

• Customer pays me (freelance) to build a website.
• I use GSAP in the website.
• I deliver the website as a package, ex. already installed on their server.
• That customer will never edit, maintain, touch the code.
• However, that customer will charge their users to use the site (whatever service it is).

In this case, can I use the free licence?

If not, which one should be acquired and by who (that customer, me, or both)?

 

Thank you!

 

 

[GreenSock]

Good question, @mistersupafly

 

The usage you described would require the commercial license that comes with "Business" memberships because a fee is collected from multiple users for the use of that site. If it was a totally free site but you only charged a one-time development fee for it (even if it's a million dollars), that'd qualify under the standard "no charge" license. See https://gsap.com/licensing/

 

As for who gets the license (you or your client), as long as the proper [maximum] number of developers is covered, it can be either you or your client. And to be clear, you do NOT need to get a new license for every project you work on! So a lot of agencies just get a Business license for themselves and it covers all of their [unedited] work products for all their clients. But if their client wants to make edits on their end, like sometimes they’ll have an agency build the initial site and then transition it to their internal team, then the client should really get a license of their own instead of piggy-backing on the agency's, especially if they have more developers than the agency. Otherwise, it’d make it easy for a huge company with hundreds of developers to hire a freelancer to start a project, buy a 1-developer GSAP license, and then take it in-house for their hundreds of developers. That wouldn’t be cool. 😳

 

But our entire business model is based on the honor system. We don’t spend a bunch of resources hunting down violators. We trust our users to do the right thing. We focus our resources on building the best tools we can and supporting them feverishly. 

 

As long as you or your client has the proper license for the project, we’re happy. And again, you don’t need a new license for each of your projects. It’s unlimited while the membership is active. 

 

We like to think that a Club GSAP membership pays for itself very quickly when you consider all the time it’ll save, the added capabilities that the bonus plugins deliver...and of course that sense of having animation superpowers is priceless 🙂

 

Let us know if you have any other questions. I look forward to seeing you on the membership roster soon. https://gsap.com/pricing