Why SpeedPy is free¶
SpeedPy is released under the MIT license and it is free forever. No license keys, no per seat fees, no paid pro tier, no feature held back for a paid edition.
Is it really free?¶
Yes. Clone it, build on it, and ship. There is nothing to buy and nothing to activate.
How the project is funded¶
SpeedPy is maintained by Appliku, the deployment platform that hosts it. We earn money when someone chooses Appliku to deploy their app.
That is the whole business model, and it is worth stating plainly because free software with no visible funding makes people suspicious, and it should.
Two things follow from it:
- Using Appliku is optional. SpeedPy runs anywhere Django runs, on your own servers, on any cloud, or on any other platform. Nothing in the code ties it to Appliku.
- We have no reason to cripple the free version, because there is no paid version to protect. The incentive is to make SpeedPy good enough that you finish your product and need somewhere to run it.
What the MIT license allows¶
The license is short, and worth reading in full in LICENSE.md in the repository. In practice it means you can:
- use SpeedPy for personal, commercial and client work
- build a product on it and sell that product
- keep your source closed
- fork it, modify it, and redistribute your version
- remove anything you do not want
The one condition: keep the copyright notice and the license text in the source. That is it.
Can I self-host, or am I locked in?¶
You can host it anywhere Django runs. The repository ships a Dockerfile, a docker-compose.yml and a release.sh, and the Deployment page documents the general shape as well as the Appliku path. appliku.yml is a convenience for one platform, not a requirement.
How this differs from paid Django boilerplates¶
The pattern in this category is a free starter tier with the SaaS parts kept for a paid plan. SaaS Pegasus, the best known Django boilerplate, added a free MIT edition in June 2026: it covers a Django foundation with auth and dev tooling, while billing, teams and AI agents sit in the paid plans, which start at $449. Their own pricing page describes the free tier as suited to hobby projects with limited needs, with limited updates and no support.
So free and MIT is no longer what separates SpeedPy. What separates it is that there is no paid tier to hold anything back. Teams, Stripe and Paddle billing, OAuth2, personal access tokens, webhooks, the REST API, MFA, the MCP server template and the CLI are all in the free release, because there is no other release.
It is also built for working alongside AI coding agents, with AGENTS.md, bundled agent skills, a CLI example and an MCP server template in the repository. See Using SpeedPy with AI coding agents.
This is not a claim that SpeedPy is better than every option for every team. A paid product comes with commercial support and a company on the other end of an invoice, and for some teams that is worth paying for. What SpeedPy offers is a complete starting point with no purchase, no license key and no feature gate.
Competitor pricing and tiers change. These figures were checked on 2026-08-14 against saaspegasus.com; if you are reading this much later, check the source before relying on it.
Third-party notices¶
LICENSE.md covers SpeedPy's own code and is pure MIT.
Bundled third-party assets that carry a different license are listed separately in NOTICE.md. Today that is the Inter font, which is licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 rather than MIT, with the full text in static/fonts/OFL-Inter.txt.
Keeping the two files separate is deliberate. It keeps LICENSE.md unambiguous, both for people and for the tools that detect licenses automatically.
Help the project¶
SpeedPy is free, so the only thing it asks for is visibility:
- Star it on GitHub. It is how other developers find it
- Tell us what you built, in the Discord