End User License Agreement

Version 1.9 · Last updated: 21 October 2026

1. Who this agreement is between

This End User License 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 organization 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 authorized 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 or Business — as described on our Pricing page. A Business white-label license is a Business license that came with an order of 5 or more one-time Business licenses. A one-time license is bought with a single payment; a monthly license is bought as a monthly subscription.

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

3. What your license grants

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

Each license is for one Site. If you have more Sites, you hold one license for each. A Business white-label license has the rights of a Business license plus the right in section 11.

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 license 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 licensee running several Sites may invite the same people to each Site within that Site's own allowance.

6. Activation, and moving a license

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

You may move a license from one domain to another — for example when a client site changes address, or when you retire a Site. You can do this yourself: in your donkeycms.com account, remove the old domain and add the new one. If anything gets in the way, write to hello@donkeycms.com.

You can hand a license to your client by asking us to move it to their email address. The license, including a white-label right if it has one, then belongs to them. Licenses are not otherwise transferable and may not be resold.

6.1 If our license server is unavailable

Your installation checks its license 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 a license bought with a one-time payment, this protection does not expire. Such a license 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 license server, we will publish a final release of the Software with license checking removed, so that every installation — on every Tier — continues to function without contacting us. We will announce this by email to license 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 and on how you paid for it:

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 license status, including expired and Free licenses. We would rather patch an installation we are not paid for than leave known vulnerabilities running in the wild.

9. If your license lapses

If a subscription payment fails, your license enters a grace period of 14 days from the due date. During the grace period, everything continues to work normally. Creem, which handles billing for us, retries the payment during this period and emails you a link to update your payment details.

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

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

The same applies when a subscription you canceled reaches the end of the period you paid for.

A license bought with a one-time payment does not lapse. There is no payment to fail and nothing you must renew: when its year of updates ends, the site keeps every paid feature of the version it runs, and only newer versions need an update renewal. So this section does not apply to it.

10. What you may not do

You may not:

A refunded or revoked license. When a payment is refunded, or we revoke a license, the right to use the Software under that license's paid Tier ends at once, and your Sites continue on the Free Tier. Continuing to use paid-Tier features after that, by any means, or redistributing a copy of the Software obtained under a refunded or revoked license, is unlicensed use of the Software, and we may take legal action against it.

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-labeling (Business white-label licenses)

A Business white-label license lets you replace the admin panel's logo and product name with your own, so the software presents to your clients under your identity. White-label licenses are issued only with orders of 5 or more one-time Business licenses, and the white-label right belongs to each license: when a license is moved to a client, the right moves with it.

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-labeled 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

A DonkeyCMS installation that uses a license key contacts donkeycms.com about once a day, sending only its license key and the domain it runs on, so we can confirm the license, its site limit, and whether an update is available, and to detect misuse of license keys. Updates are downloaded from our server. If you connect Google Drive backups, your installation's requests to renew its Google access pass through our server, which keeps no copy.

DonkeyCMS never sends us your content, your visitors' data, or your database.

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 license for breach does not entitle you to a refund.

You may stop using the Software at any time. The Terms of Service cover cancellation and the 14-day refund of your first payment, and say that volume orders and update renewals are not refunded; a refund ends the license it paid for, as section 10 describes.

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 license, 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, license transfers, or anything else: hello@donkeycms.com. Our full company details are on the Contact page.