Pangolin, an open-source tunneled reverse proxy that gained widespread adoption as a self-hosted alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels, has launched a new Enterprise Edition and introduced a dual-licensing model to ensure sustainable growth while preserving the project’s community roots.
If you are not familiar with it, Pangolin lets users securely expose local web services to the internet without opening ports or dealing with complex firewall rules. It’s widely used by self-hosting enthusiasts who prefer a privacy-focused, fully self-hosted solution rather than relying on third-party tunneling services like Cloudflare or Ngrok.
With this update, Pangolin is now available in two editions:
- Community Edition: still free and open-source under the AGPL-3.0 license.
- Enterprise Edition: offered under the new Fossorial Commercial License, adding commercial features, scalability options, and professional support.
Now, if you’re concerned about the direction Pangolin’s heading, don’t worry. The developers said the move will help fund ongoing development and offer enterprise-grade capabilities that larger organizations often need — including advanced authentication, monitoring, and priority support.
At the same time, this dual licensing shift will help keep community editions fully open and transparent. On top of that, the project maintainers explained that the Enterprise Edition is free to use for non-commercial users and small businesses.
“The EE is free to use if you are not using Pangolin in a business capacity or if your business makes less than $100,000 in annual revenue. Users who wish to use the EE can opt-in and obtain a free license key from our cloud. Businesses not qualifying will need to purchase a license key from us to be legally compliant, or continue to use the CE.”
According to the announcement, this new model allows Pangolin to keep the core software open while generating revenue to fund development and offer professional support for companies using it in production.
Lastly, the dual-licensing shift follows a recent seed funding round that will help accelerate new features and strengthen Pangolin’s security model.
For more information, see the official announcement.
