Why Open Source

VoxelSite is free and open source, licensed under AGPL-3.0. The source code lives at github.com/NowSquare/VoxelSite. This page explains why a product that sold for money is now free, with the real numbers, so you can judge the decision yourself.

The marketplace math

VoxelSite sold on CodeCanyon. A sale there netted about €15 after marketplace fees and taxes. One support ticket that took an hour cost more than the sale earned. In 2026 the marketplace moved all authors to a flat 50% fee, ended its exclusivity program, and closed author applications.

That was the end of an arc, not the start of one. From an author's seat, CodeCanyon has run in maintenance mode for over a decade while Envato built Elements and its stock content business. The author tools, search, and licensing system of 2026 are the ones we worked with in the mid-2010s. Elements is the business now; the marketplaces are left to wind down. Continuing to sell there meant tying the product to a channel with no future, at half margin, for buyers whose €15 could not fund a single hour of the work they expected.

Why open source, and not a higher price

We faced a choice: reprice VoxelSite as a premium product on our own channels, or set it free. For our flagship, Reward Loyalty, repricing was the answer. For VoxelSite, open source is, and the reason is honest: the best guarantee of ongoing development for this product is removing money from the equation, not adding more of it.

A paid product creates a contract: every sale obligates support, every buyer expects updates, and when the revenue does not cover those obligations, development stalls and the product dies quietly. That is the marketplace trap, and a higher price on a smaller product does not escape it.

Open source inverts the deal. Nobody is owed anything, so everything we ship is a contribution instead of a debt. Development happens in public, on its own pace, visible in the commit history and releases. The project no longer depends on any sales channel, any marketplace policy, or any revenue threshold. If we stopped tomorrow, the code, the license, and the right to continue it belong to everyone. No paid product can promise that.

If you bought VoxelSite

You bought the product as it existed on the day of purchase, and you received exactly that: the full source code, working as described, plus support through your support term. Your license is valid, your installation keeps working, and your support term will be honored in full.

Open-sourcing the project afterward does not undo or reduce what you received. It adds to it: you now also have every future release, free, forever, under a license that permits more than the one you bought. Buyers are the one group that lost nothing and gained the most.

For that reason, the license change is not grounds for a refund. Refunds on the marketplace cover items that were not as described or did not work; VoxelSite was delivered as described and works. A pricing decision made after your purchase, in your favor, does not change what was delivered. We decline refund requests that cite the open-source release, and we point them to this page.

To early buyers, plainly: your purchases funded the years in which VoxelSite was built. Thank you. The product going free is not a devaluation of what you paid for; it is the reason the thing you paid for will keep improving.

Where development happens now

• Source and releases: github.com/NowSquare/VoxelSite
• Bug reports and improvement requests: GitHub issues. One issue per problem, with your PHP version, hosting type, steps to reproduce, and what you expected.
• Pull requests: open an issue to discuss before writing code. Small, focused changes with tests have the best chance of merging.

What AGPL-3.0 means for you

Use it, modify it, and self-host it freely, also commercially, for yourself or for clients. If you offer a modified version of VoxelSite to others as a service, your changes stay open. That is the entire obligation.

Custom work

NowSquare is available for paid custom development, separate from the open-source GitHub issue queue. Use the paid work option for paid development inquiries.