Is NativeLink free?

Yes — NativeLink is source-available and free for permitted self-hosted use. Most of the monorepo is licensed under FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0, which allows internal use, modification, and redistribution for non-competing purposes, then grants an Apache 2.0 future license on the schedule described in the repository LICENSE. The customer-facing summary lives on the NativeLink license page.

NativeLink is not a single-license monorepo. Some feature modules carry their own source headers. In particular, metrics and remote persistent workers are licensed under the Business Source License. Developers using NativeLink for an individual cache do not need a commercial license. Teams using those modules in shared, production, or commercial settings can use NativeLink Cloud, Enterprise, or a separate commercial license, which is intentionally very inexpensive. Meaningful contributors may be eligible for license waivers; contact the maintainers before relying on one.

If you'd rather pay someone to run it for you, two paid tiers exist:

• Cloud — managed multi-tenant cluster, flat $999+/month. Full SLA, autoscaling, dashboard.
• Enterprise — single-tenant deployment, dedicated solutions engineer, on-prem or managed. Custom contracts.

The pricing page has the feature comparison.

What does "free" actually cover

• The full RE-API server: CAS, AC, scheduler, worker.
• Every storage backend: filesystem, S3, Redis, GCS, Azure Blob.
• Every supported build client: Bazel, Buck2, Reclient, Pants, Goma.
• The CLI tooling and Helm chart.

No artificial limits on cache size, action count, worker count, or team size. The self-hosted build is the same codebase we run in production, subject to the license that applies to each module, minus the operational tooling and dedicated support that Cloud and Enterprise add.

What you'd pay for instead

Hosting NativeLink yourself costs:

• Compute for the control plane (typically a few small VMs).
• Storage for the CAS (S3 / equivalent, sized for ~5-20 GB per active developer per week).
• Worker compute (variable; this is the part Cloud rents to you).
• Engineer hours running it.

For most teams under 30 engineers, self-host is cheaper. Past that, Cloud usually wins on engineer-time alone.