We would like to confirm whether the following use case is permitted under the Pritunl license.
We are considering deploying Pritunl VPN Server on appliances or servers provided to our customers.
Our customers would not be charged for access to the Pritunl software or VPN functionality itself. The VPN functionality would remain available even if the customer does not purchase a maintenance or support contract from us.
However, we may charge customers for hardware maintenance, OS/network maintenance, configuration support, troubleshooting, and general operational support related to the appliance/server environment.
We would not sell Pritunl itself as a standalone product, and we would not charge users specifically for access to the Pritunl VPN software.
Would this be considered “commercial purposes” under the Pritunl license, specifically the clause stating that commercial purposes means a third party has to pay in order to access the Software?
Also, if this use case requires a specific Pritunl subscription or separate written permission, please let us know.
It likely would not be allowed with the license. The intention of the software is for enterprise use not for personal VPNs. The license is designed to prevent the software from being offered as a personal VPN product. There are already a lot of other options for these services and the software isn’t well suited for this use case.
We understand that the Pritunl license is intended to prevent the software from being offered as a personal VPN product, and that our previously described use case would likely not be allowed under the current license.
To avoid any misunderstanding, we would like to ask a few follow-up questions regarding enterprise use cases.
Our intended use case is not to provide a personal VPN service to general consumers. Rather, we are considering providing dedicated appliances or servers to enterprise customers for their own internal corporate VPN use.
Could you please clarify the following points?
Is providing a dedicated appliance or server with Pritunl installed to an enterprise customer prohibited, even when the VPN is used only for that customer’s internal corporate network?
Would the use case still be prohibited if the end customer uses Pritunl only as an internal VPN for its employees, offices, or business systems, and not as a public or personal VPN service?
Would this type of enterprise appliance or managed service use case be permitted if a Pritunl Enterprise, Premium, or other paid subscription is purchased?
If a paid Pritunl subscription would make this use case permissible, which party should hold the subscription: our company as the appliance/service provider, or each end customer directly?
Does Pritunl offer any separate written permission, reseller arrangement, MSP arrangement, partner agreement, or other commercial license that would allow us to provide deployment, maintenance, and operational support for Pritunl-based appliances or servers used by enterprise customers?
Our goal is to ensure that we comply with the Pritunl license and any applicable commercial requirements before proceeding.
The software isn’t difficult to install, there’s no additional benefit to allowing third parties to do what you’re describing. This will only lead to more low quality offerings like the companies that are listing the free version of Pritunl on the AWS and Azure marketplace with added usage costs which isn’t allowed. Maybe you won’t do that but I can’t change the license without also allowing all of that.