The unit of licensing in Binions is a “set”. A set is one complete installation of Binions — all of its background services together — running on a single host. You never licence the individual services on their own; you always licence the whole set. This page explains what a set is, how it is counted per host, and which sets are free and which are paid.
The one rule to remember. Licensing is counted per set, per host: one set is the entire platform on one machine. One non-commercial set on one host is free forever; everything beyond that is paid.
Binions is made of a suite of focused background services — we call them daemons. Each daemon does one job: sending and receiving email, calling a web API, running a database query, moving a file, talking to an AI model, reading an industrial sensor, and so on. Together, all of those daemons on one machine make up a set.
A licence covers one set on one host. When you activate Binions, the licence is tied to that specific machine, so it runs on the host it was activated on and not on a different one. Install Binions on a second machine and that is a second, separate set — with its own licence.
To make this counting precise, Binions uses a small piece of vocabulary:
| Set | One complete installation of Binions (all native daemons) on one host. |
| Host | One machine — a Raspberry Pi*, a virtual machine, or a physical server. |
| Lane | The right to run one set on one host. Hold one lane and you can run Binions on one machine. |
You can hold several lanes at once — for example, your free non-commercial lane plus one or more paid lanes for additional machines. Each lane maps to exactly one host.
The simple way to picture it. One lane = one set = one host. Want Binions on three machines? You need three lanes — and the counting below decides which of them are free and which are paid.
The counting comes down to two questions: how many hosts, and commercial or not. Putting those together gives a short, clear table:
| First host, non-commercial | Free forever. One set on one host for hobby, homelab, learning, or evaluation — no card, no expiry. |
| Additional host (a 2nd set or more) | Paid — even when the use is non-commercial. Only the first non-commercial host is free. |
| Any commercial use | Paid from the first host, and it requires your company details. |
So the allowed combinations are: a free non-commercial set, a paid non-commercial set (for extra hosts), and a paid commercial set. The one combination that does not exist is a free commercial set — the free set is always non-commercial.
For the difference between commercial and non-commercial use — and where the line sits — see Commercial vs non-commercial. For the same free-and-paid structure laid out side by side, see the Plan comparison.
A set is licensed for a whole major version line. One licence covers your current major from its first release to its last — for example, every 1.x release — and all the minor and patch updates within it are included at no extra cost. When a new major version arrives (such as 2.0.0), that is a new licence or an upgrade.
Full details, including how minor and patch updates are counted, live in Limits & versions.
Honour-system, privacy-respecting. Whether your use is commercial is governed by the End-User Licence Agreement, not by any monitoring on our side. Binions does not watch what your automations do or report your usage back to us — we trust you to choose the right licence for how you use it.
* Raspberry Pi and other 64-bit ARM hardware are supported from the public 1.0 release. Binions is currently in alpha, and the alpha packages are for 64-bit x86 (amd64) only.