Keep your IP
Modifications, extensions, and proprietary wrappers stay yours. No source disclosure required.
This section is for engineers embedding the Refract SDK. For NextConsensus forecasting programs, see Programs.
Embed deterministic source-change infrastructure.
Refract turns versioned public sources into reproducible change events with temporal provenance. A commercial license lets you embed, modify, and distribute it in proprietary products—without AGPL copyleft obligations.
Why license commercially?
Build on the engine. Keep your IP.
Refract's AGPL-3.0 core is free to use, modify, and self-host. But if you expose modified code as a network service, AGPL requires you to offer your modified source to users. The commercial license waives that obligation — you keep your changes private.
Embed anywhere
Internal tools, client deliverables, SaaS products, on-prem deployments, air-gapped environments.
Redistribute freely
Embed in products you distribute to customers. OEM license covers unlimited redistribution.
Standards alignment
Build on a deterministic observation layer for versioned public knowledge.
Developer
$5,000/yearFor individual developers and small teams integrating Refract into proprietary products.
- Commercial license for up to 3 developers
- Proprietary integration & distribution rights
- Standard support via GitHub issues
- Access to private releases
Enterprise
$25,000/yearFor organizations embedding Refract in internal tools, client deliverables, or SaaS products.
- Commercial license for unlimited developers
- Proprietary integration & distribution rights
- Your questions answered ahead of the public queue
- Direct integration guidance from the author
- Early access to new analyzers and event kinds
OEM / Embedded
CustomFor companies embedding Refract directly into a commercial product distributed to third parties.
- Redistribution rights within your product
- White-label options
- A named engineering contact — currently the author
- Custom feature development, scoped and quoted per request
- Source code escrow, arranged if you require it
Integration patterns
What Refract is built to sit inside
These are the shapes the engine is designed for, not a customer list. Refract is early and nobody has shipped a commercial product on it yet — if one of these is what you had in mind, you would be the first, and you should price that in.
Clinical Trial Platform
Embed Refract’s event stream to populate versioned evidence timelines with source hashes, timestamps, and field-level changes.
Medical Information System
Attach inspectable source histories to evidence records so downstream systems can distinguish current text from prior versions.
Regulatory Submission Software
Detect and normalize changes across public labels, guidance, and related source records without losing the original version trail.
Payer Analytics Platform
Create reproducible diffs for public coverage policies and supporting sources as inputs to downstream analysis.
Open source
Open-source ecosystem
Refract is open source, and it sits in a small ecosystem of reproducible health-economics tooling. Where they overlap, we build on and cite the same standards.
Refract on GitHub
Deterministic source-change infrastructure, public
Refract org
GitHub organization for the Refract ecosystem
hesim
Open-source health-economic simulation modeling, arXiv:2102.09437
ready4
Open-source computational health-economics modeling framework
Adjacent projects in the ecosystem include htaBIM (an ISPOR-TF-compliant budget-impact framework) and nccn-monitor (an open source server that diffs NCCN guideline changes).
Datasets published from this work will be given persistent identifiers so they stay citable. None has been published yet.
FAQ
Common licensing questions.
What does the commercial license actually give me?
Full rights to embed, modify, and distribute Refract within your proprietary products and services — without any obligation to open-source your modifications or your application code. The AGPL copyleft obligation is waived.
What can I build with Refract under the commercial license?
Any proprietary product: internal evidence-review tools, client-facing SaaS, clinical decision support, regulatory submission software, payer analytics platforms, medical information systems. The license covers modification, embedding, and redistribution within your commercial products.
How is this different from using Refract under AGPL?
Under AGPL-3.0, if you modify Refract and expose it as a network service (API, SaaS, internal tool accessed via browser), you must offer your modified source code to users. The commercial license removes this obligation entirely — you keep your changes private.
Does the Developer license cover contractors?
Yes. The per-developer count includes full-time employees and contractors actively working with the Refract codebase.
What support is included?
Worth being plain about this: NextConsensus is one person, so every tier reaches the same engineer — the one who wrote Refract. Developer is GitHub issues alongside everyone else. Enterprise puts you at the front of that queue, with a target of two business days. OEM gets a direct line and a response commitment written into the agreement. There is no support organization behind any of it, which is either exactly what you want or a reason to pass.
Refract is built by NextConsensus
Need something not listed here?
Custom terms, academic discounts, evaluation licenses, and source code escrow are available.