Historically, MongoDB was licensed under the GNU AGPL (Affero General Public License). This was tricky for commercial users because it required companies to open-source their entire application if they modified the database code.

Since October 2018, MongoDB Community Edition has been licensed under the . This replaced the previous GNU AGPLv3 license.

This is where developers get into trouble.

If you are building a startup, a side hustle that hopes to become a business, or an internal enterprise tool, you have likely asked this question: "Can I use the free version of MongoDB to run my actual business, or do I need to pay for Enterprise?"

Free, self-hosted, includes core database features.