Licensing Overview
Open-core AGPL vs commercial cloud.
This page is a human-readable summary of QQueue's licensing structure. It is not legal advice. Have qualified legal counsel review the license files and this summary before relying on them for a commercial launch.
Positioning
QQueue is an open-core email platform built for teams that want the flexibility of self-hosting and the convenience of managed email infrastructure.
The QQueue Core platform is open source and licensed under AGPL-3.0. It provides the building blocks for email delivery, campaigns, transactional messaging, queues, workers, templates, contacts, and SMTP integrations.
QQueue Cloud extends the core platform with managed services and advanced operational tooling, including billing, subscription management, deliverability monitoring, abuse prevention, reputation management, usage controls, analytics, and hosted infrastructure.
QQueue is built with self-hosted infrastructure and Mailcow operators in mind, but can also be used by teams that want a fully managed hosted email platform.
QQueue Core
QQueue Core is open source under the GNU Affero General Public License version
3.0 (AGPL-3.0-only). The root
AGPL license file contains the AGPL-3.0
text.
Core includes the self-hosted platform pieces such as auth basics, organizations, SMTP connections, contacts, templates, campaigns, transactional email APIs, queues, workers, and shared schemas/types, unless a file or directory says otherwise.
Contributors should understand that contributions to AGPL core remain under AGPL-3.0 unless another license is explicitly stated.
QQueue Cloud
QQueue Cloud is proprietary commercial software. Copyright (C) 2026 Nana
Aboagye. All rights reserved. Code under apps/cloud/ is not covered by the
root AGPL-3.0 grant and is governed by
cloud commercial license.
Commercial self-hosted customers need an active commercial license or explicit written permission to use proprietary cloud features. Hosted cloud customers use QQueue under separate commercial SaaS terms.
SDKs
SDKs may be permissively licensed under MIT where their package metadata and
license files say so. For example, packages/sdk is intended to be distributed
under MIT.
Documentation
Documentation may be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International (CC-BY-4.0) where stated. If documentation or asset licensing is
split out later, keep the applicable notice close to the files it covers.
Trademarks
QQueue branding is not covered by the software license. The QQueue name, logo, wordmark, branding, and related marks are trademarks of Nana Aboagye Boateng. See Trademark.
Practical Summary
- QQueue Core: AGPL-3.0, self-hostable, open source.
- QQueue Cloud: proprietary/commercial, managed hosting and advanced operations.
- SDKs: MIT licensed for easy adoption where package-specific notices say so.
- Docs: CC-BY-4.0 where documentation-specific notices say so.
- Branding: QQueue name, logo, and marks are protected by trademark terms.