Draft — pending legal review. This page describes our intended licence terms but has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. It should not be treated as final or legally binding until that review is complete.

End User Licence Agreement

Version 1.0 · Last updated: September 2026

1. Who this agreement is between

This End User Licence Agreement ("Agreement") is between DONKEYBYTE SRL, a company registered in Romania (Registration no. J2024001458235, VAT RO49649125, Str. Ciresului, Nr. 33 Dobroesti, Ilfov) — "we", "us", "DonkeyByte" — and you, the person or organisation installing or using DonkeyCMS ("you").

It governs your use of the software. Your purchase itself — payment, refunds, and your cancellation rights — is governed separately by our Terms of Service. If you are using DonkeyCMS on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to accept this Agreement for that company.

By installing, activating or using DonkeyCMS, you accept this Agreement. If you do not accept it, do not install or use the software.

2. Definitions

Software means DonkeyCMS, including its source code, files, updates and documentation.

Site means one installation of the Software serving one domain or subdomain in production. See section 4.

Team Member means a user account within a Site's admin panel other than the Master account.

Tier means the plan you hold — Free, Pro, Business or Agency — as described on our Pricing page.

Licence means the permission granted in section 3, for the Tier you hold and for as long as it remains active.

3. What your licence grants

Subject to this Agreement, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide licence to install and use the Software on the number of Sites and with the number of Team Members set out for your Tier:

• Free — 1 Site. The Master account only; no Team Members.
• Pro — 1 Site. The Master account plus up to 2 Team Members.
• Business — up to 10 Sites. Per Site, the Master account plus up to 4 Team Members.
• Agency — up to 50 Sites, and unlimited Team Members per Site. If you need more than 50 Sites, you may hold more than one Agency licence; each carries its own 50 Sites.

You may install the Software for your own use or on behalf of your clients. Where you install it for a client, you remain responsible for compliance with this Agreement in respect of that installation.

4. What counts as a Site

A Site is one production installation serving one domain or subdomain. A blog at example.com/blog and one at shop.example.com/blog are two Sites.

In addition to each licensed Site, you may keep one non-production copy of that installation — a local development copy, a staging server, or a backup restored for testing — at no additional licence cost, provided it is not publicly available as a live website.

5. Team members

Team Member allowances are per Site, not pooled across Sites. Each installation has its own user table, so a Business licensee running several Sites may invite the same people to each Site within that Site's own allowance.

6. Activation, and moving a licence

Paid Tiers are activated with a licence key issued to you after purchase. Your licence key is personal to you and must not be shared, published, or used on more Sites than your Tier permits.

You may move a licence from one domain to another — for example when a client site changes address, or when you retire a Site. Contact us at hello@donkeycms.com and we will reassign it.

6.1 If our licence server is unavailable

Your installation checks its licence with our server periodically. If our server cannot be reached — whether for minutes or for months — your installation keeps working at the Tier it last confirmed. It does not stop working, and it does not lose features, because of a problem at our end. It keeps trying to reach us, and applies whatever our server tells it once contact is restored.

For subscriptions, this protection lasts 30 days, after which the installation returns to the Free Tier. This is deliberate: a subscription that can no longer be confirmed should not continue indefinitely.

For an Agency lifetime licence, this protection does not expire. A lifetime licence is never downgraded because our server is unreachable, however long that lasts. You paid once, and your right to use the Software does not depend on us keeping a server running.

6.2 If DonkeyCMS is ever discontinued

If we ever permanently discontinue DonkeyCMS or shut down our licence server, we will publish a final release of the Software with licence checking removed, so that every installation — on every Tier — continues to function without contacting us. We will announce this by email to licence holders and on our website before the server is retired, wherever that is within our control.

This commitment exists because the Software is self-hosted and runs on your own server. It should not stop working because our company does.

7. Updates and support

What updates you receive depends on your Tier:

• Subscriptions (Pro, Business, Agency annual) — you receive updates and support for as long as your subscription is active.
• Agency lifetime — you receive all updates within the same major version. Updates to version 1.x are included permanently. A future version 2.0 is a separate paid upgrade, offered at a discount to existing lifetime licence holders.
• Free — you receive updates to the Free Tier of the Software.

Support is provided by email and covers the Software itself. It does not cover your web hosting, your own website's HTML, CSS or JavaScript, third-party templates, or custom code you or someone else has written — although we will help where we reasonably can.

8. Security updates are free for everyone

Security fixes are made available to all installations regardless of Tier or licence status, including expired and Free licences. We would rather patch an installation we are not paid for than leave known vulnerabilities running in the wild.

9. If your licence lapses

If a subscription payment fails, your licence enters a grace period of 14 days from the due date. During the grace period, everything continues to work normally and we will contact you by email — before the payment is due, the day after a failed payment, and again as the deadline approaches.

If the licence is still unpaid after the grace period, the installation reverts to the Free Tier. Specifically:

• Your published content stays published. Your blog, posts, images, categories and comments continue to be served to visitors exactly as before. We do not take a live website offline, and we do not delete anything.
• Management drops to Free Tier features. Paid features remain visible in the admin panel but become read-only or locked, marked with an upgrade prompt.
• The Recent Posts Widget stops rendering. If you embedded it on your own homepage, that section becomes empty. The embed code can stay in place — the widget resumes automatically if you renew.
• "Sync with page" theme mode stops following your site. The blog keeps the appearance it last had, and you can set a fixed Light or Dark mode at any time.
• The JSON API stops serving. If you have another application reading it, that application will stop receiving data.
• The newsletter subscribe form stops accepting signups. Subscribers you already collected are held in your own newsletter provider's account and are unaffected.
• The "Powered by DonkeyCMS" credit returns to your public pages, as it appears on the Free Tier.

All of this reverses when you renew. Nothing is deleted, and no configuration is lost.

10. What you may not do

You may not:

• resell, redistribute, sublicense, rent, lease or lend the Software, or make it available for download by anyone else, whether modified or not;
• use one licence across more Sites than your Tier permits, or share your licence key;
• remove, obscure or alter any copyright, trademark or authorship notice in the source code;
• remove or bypass the "Powered by DonkeyCMS" credit while on the Free Tier;
• circumvent, disable or tamper with licence checks, or use a licence key you were not issued;
• use the Software to distribute malware, or for any unlawful purpose.

You may modify the Software for your own installations, including editing templates and source files. Modification does not entitle you to redistribute the result, and we cannot support an installation whose core files have been modified.

Nothing in this section restricts any right you have under applicable law that cannot be excluded by agreement — including, where the law provides it, the right to study or adapt the Software for interoperability purposes.

11. White-labelling (Agency Tier)

The Agency Tier lets you replace the admin panel's logo and product name with your own, so the software presents to your clients under your identity.

This is a presentation right only. It does not transfer ownership, and it does not grant any right to resell, redistribute or sublicense the Software, to present it as your own product to anyone other than your own clients using it, or to remove copyright and authorship notices from the source code. Section 10 continues to apply in full to a white-labelled installation.

12. Ownership

The Software is licensed, not sold. DonkeyByte retains all intellectual property rights in it. You own your own content, your own configuration, and any custom code you write.

13. Your content and your data

DonkeyCMS is self-hosted. Your posts, images, comments, subscriber data and database live on your hosting, under your control. We have no access to them, we do not hold copies, and we cannot recover them for you.

Backups are your responsibility. The Software includes backup tools, but running them, and keeping the results somewhere safe, is up to you.

14. Third-party services

DonkeyCMS can connect to services you hold your own accounts with — among them Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, Cloudflare Turnstile, and newsletter providers including Mailchimp, Brevo, MailerLite, GetResponse, NewsMAN and theMarketer.

Those services are governed by your agreements with them, not by this one. We are not responsible for their availability, their pricing, or changes they make to their own interfaces, though we will make reasonable efforts to keep our integrations working.

15. What the Software sends us

At the current version, DonkeyCMS does not transmit any information to us. It runs entirely on your hosting.

When licence verification is introduced, a paid installation will periodically contact donkeycms.com to confirm its licence is active, sending only its licence key, the domain it is installed on, its version, and its Tier. It will not send your content, your visitors' data, or your database. We will publish an updated version of this Agreement before that change ships.

16. No warranty

The Software is provided "as is". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, that it will be compatible with every hosting environment, theme or plugin, or that it will meet a particular requirement of yours.

If you are a consumer, this section does not affect your statutory rights, which cannot be excluded.

17. Limitation of liability

DonkeyCMS runs on infrastructure we do not control and alongside code we did not write. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of business, loss of data, or loss of goodwill arising from your use of the Software.

Where we are liable, our total liability is limited to the amount you paid us for the Software in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Nothing in this Agreement limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited under applicable law. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

18. Termination

This Agreement continues until terminated. It ends automatically if you breach section 10 and do not correct the breach within 30 days of us asking you to.

On termination you must stop using the Software and remove it from your Sites. Sections 12, 13, 16, 17 and 20 survive termination. Terminating a licence for breach does not entitle you to a refund.

You may stop using the Software at any time; see the Terms of Service for cancellation and refunds.

19. Changes to this Agreement

We may update this Agreement as the product changes. The version that applies to you is the one published when you purchase or renew. Material changes will be notified by email to the address on your licence, and every version is dated at the top of this page.

20. Governing law

This Agreement is governed by Romanian law, and the courts of Romania have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer law in your own country, or of your right to bring proceedings there.

21. Contact

Questions about this Agreement, licence transfers, or anything else: hello@donkeycms.com. Our full company details are on the Contact page.