How it stays free
Who pays for a tool shapes who it serves. The local app is open source, local-first, and free forever. The cloud services are a pay-for-what-you-use business, a small base fee plus your actual usage, so the tool stays reachable without a per-seat subscription.
Why it costs so little to run
ResearchOS is local-first. Your notebook lives in a folder on your own disk, not on our servers, so there is almost nothing to host and almost nothing to pay for in the first place. The code is open source under AGPLv3, maintained by its author rather than a company that needs the user base monetized. It is not backed by venture capital, it is not chasing an acquisition, and it does not answer to investors who need payment extracted per user. That is a fundamentally different incentive than software built to maximize revenue per seat.
ResearchOS grew out of work begun during a UW-Madison Distinguished Research Fellowship. The fellowship is where the project started; it does not fund the tool today.
What that means for your lab
Because keeping the tool running does not depend on extracting payment from the people using it, ResearchOS does not have the usual levers a commercial ELN reaches for.
- No paywalled local features. The whole local app is free. The cloud services are pay-for-what-you-use, a small base fee plus your actual usage at a fair markup, with storage at roughly cost.
- No fixed per-seat license. You pay a flat lab base fee plus the usage your lab actually generates, instead of a fixed price per head whether or not they use the cloud.
- Open by license. ResearchOS is AGPLv3, so even if you never pay anything, you keep the right to read, fork, and self-host the code. The copyright is held by the author, Grant R. Nickles.
Why this keeps it reachable for low-resource labs
A per-seat ELN subscription is a real barrier. For a small lab, a teaching lab, a lab at an under-resourced institution, or a researcher in a setting where the field's standard tools are out of budget, the price is often the reason good data management never happens. Building the tool to be local-first and open removes that barrier at the point of use. The lab that most needs a free tool is the lab least able to argue for a software line item, and ResearchOS is built so those labs are not left out.
What we are careful not to promise
It would be easy, and dishonest, to promise the project will never cost anything under any circumstances. No one can guarantee the funding landscape years out. What ResearchOS can say plainly is the commitment behind the design. The local app and a free network tier stay free and open, the license guarantees the code can never be taken back, and the paid cloud services fund the work rather than locking anyone in.