K9s Adopts Prosperity Public License: What It Means for You
The terminal waits. The green prompt blinks. You install K9s, and it’s free. But the license behind it has changed, and you need to understand exactly how.
The K9s licensing model now uses the Prosperity Public License (PPL). This license allows free use for personal projects, evaluations, and limited commercial activity. Once your organization passes the revenue threshold—currently set at $5 million a year—you must purchase a commercial license. This change affects companies that have baked K9s into internal workflows or are distributing it as part of a product offering.
Under the PPL, the core code is open source in terms of visibility, but it’s not free for unrestricted business use. This distinction matters when planning budgets, vendor compliance, and legal sign-off. The PPL grants a three-year term after the code’s release, after which it reverts to a more permissive license. But within that window, high-revenue organizations must pay.
For engineering teams, the implication is clear: review your usage. If you’re just managing personal clusters or testing, nothing changes. If you’re in production and over the revenue cap, you’ll need a commercial agreement. The commercial license terms are available from the K9s maintainers and often include support options. That support may itself be worth the price for teams running Kubernetes at scale.
The shift from a permissive license to the PPL model reflects a broader trend in open source: sustainable funding for maintainers without cutting off community access. K9s is still one of the fastest ways to navigate Kubernetes clusters from the terminal. The licensing model simply ensures that commercial gain comes with fair compensation.
Before you roll K9s into your stack at scale, read the Prosperity Public License, measure your organizational revenue, and run a quick audit to stay compliant. If you need a modern alternative with a clear and permissive license model, see how hoop.dev can replace or complement your workflow—try it live in minutes.