On July 26, 2023, we transitioned our FingerprintJS licensing from MIT to Business Source License (BSL 1.1). This transition helps ensure fair and open usage for most of our open-source community, and will now require a commercial license for use in production. This change enables us to further support and invest in our mission to empower engineering teams to build safe and seamless online services.
FingerprintJS will continue to be available and accessible for individuals looking to utilize our source-available browser fingerprinting library for personal projects and the exploration of browser fingerprinting technology. Businesses using FingerprintJS in production must purchase a commercial FingerprintJS license or migrate to the Fingerprint device intelligence platform.
Why are we making this change?
FingerprintJS is an integral part of Fingerprint. Since the inception of FingerprintJS back in 2012, we’ve maintained our commitment to providing the open-source community with the most accurate browser fingerprinting library.
There are a few reasons why we’re making this change, including:
- Sustainability: Open source software development requires continuous innovation, maintenance, and security updates. Shifting to a BSL 1.1 provides a sustainable business model while keeping the source code available for our active developer community.
- Protection against in-production commercial use: There are concerns within the open-source community about software providers using open-source software without contributing or paying for its development. A commercial license restricts these providers from using FingerprintJS software without previously purchasing it.
- Source code availability: We want to keep FingerprintJS available for non-production use, and this allows us to do this without closing the source code for everyone.
- Encouraging commercial partnerships: By limiting the free commercial usage of the software, we want to enable users to form commercial partnerships with Fingerprint to provide a solution that best fits their use cases.
What’s changing?
FingerprintJS v4.0.0 releases on July 26, 2023, and those using FingerprintJS for personal projects and explorative purposes will still be able to access and use FingerprintJS the same way you have been doing so. To use v4 and above for production purposes, however, you will need to either upgrade to one of our paid tiers or purchase a commercial license.
The release of FingerprintJS v4.0.0 includes new signals, namely Apple Pay support detection, Private Click Measurement (PCM) detection, and improved WebGL capabilities detection.
Additionally, Apple announced several important privacy updates that will ship with macOS Sonoma. FingerprintJS version 4.0.0 will include a critical update making it fully compatible with the upcoming Safari 17 release. The FingerprintJS updates guarantee compatibility, while new signals will increase our identification accuracy.
| Before license change (Versions 3.x and lower) | After license change (Versions 4.x and higher) | |
|---|---|---|
| License | MIT | BSL 1.1 |
| Use FingerprintJS for research, explorative and all other non-commercial purposes. | ✅ | ✅ |
| Fork FingerprintJS repo for production. | ✅ | ❌ (Requires a commercial license to be purchased) |
| Use FingerprintJS in production. | ✅ | ❌ (Requires a commercial license to be purchased) |
If you’d like to purchase a commercial FingerprintJS license, please contact our sales team. If you want to try one of our device intelligence API paid plans, we offer a 14-day free trial and you can sign up for it anytime.
