Today, alongside the release of Avalonia 12, we're retiring the Avalonia Accelerate brand entirely.
Accelerate served a purpose when we launched it, but the longer it ran, the clearer it became that the name was working against us. Developers landing on our website saw "Avalonia" and "Accelerate" and reasonably concluded they were two different products. They weren't. Accelerate was always enhanced Avalonia, and we should have said so from the start.
So from today, we're saying it plainly.
Before getting into what changes, the most important thing to say is what doesn't. If you're a paid Accelerate subscriber, you are unaffected. Your pricing is locked in permanently, your subscription continues without interruption, and every feature we committed to on the original roadmap will still be delivered. In fact, we're going a step further: Charts, which were never part of the original Accelerate scope, are coming to existing subscribers too. You're not being asked to do anything, pay anything more, or make any decision. If you're happy where you are, stay there.
A Path, Not a Pricing Grid
Avalonia is now a single product. There are no separate brands, no parallel product lines, no confusion about what belongs where. What we do have is a clear progression of tiers, each one a natural step up from the last.
It starts with Avalonia Free: the MIT-licensed, open-source framework the community knows and loves. We've also made the Visual Studio Code extension entirely free with no restrictions whatsoever. Download it, run it. No account. No sign-in. No gatekeeping. It's our on-ramp into the ecosystem, and we want as many developers as possible walking through it.
-
Avalonia Community is for non-commercial use. If you're a student, hobbyist, or open-source contributor, this is yours, free and without restriction.
-
Avalonia Plus is where the progression becomes commercial. This tier is for developers who want a richer development experience: advanced tooling, deeper debugging, and faster inner-loop productivity, without necessarily needing the full set of UI controls. This tier exists because customers told us they wanted it. For a long time, tooling and components were bundled together, and plenty of teams wanted one without the other. Now they can have it.
-
Avalonia Pro is the complete package. Everything in Plus, plus the full suite of professional UI controls and priority GitHub issue responses on a best-effort basis. If you're building serious commercial software with Avalonia and you want the fastest, most capable path from idea to production, this is where you belong. The controls alone remove weeks of work, and the tooling compounds every hour you save. Pro isn't an upsell for its own sake; it's what building with Avalonia looks like when you have everything available.
-
Avalonia Enterprise is for organisations that need more than tooling and controls: source code access to commercial components, and the kind of deep support relationship where you're talking to the people who built the framework, not a ticketing system. If you're deploying Avalonia at scale, this is the tier that protects that investment.
The Commercial Model, Rethought
This restructure is more than a renaming exercise. It's a rethink of how we price and who we're pricing for, because individuals and organisations are not the same buyer, and treating them as if they were has caused us real problems. The most visible symptom: full vendor onboarding processes, security questionnaires, and procurement workflows completed for single-licence sales. That overhead isn't sustainable at low price points, and it quietly distorted everything else.
The fix is to separate the two buyer types cleanly. We're following the JetBrains model. Individual licences carry a meaningful discount and can absolutely be used in a professional context. The one rule: employers cannot reimburse individual licence costs. If your company is buying, it's an organisational licence. If you're buying it yourself and using it at work on your own account, the individual price applies. Most developers recognise this model immediately, which is exactly why we chose it.
Let's Talk Honestly About Community
The Community tier is moving to non-commercial use only. This is the part of this announcement that will generate the most discussion, so I'd rather address it directly than hope nobody notices.
The Community tier is moving to non-commercial use only. For new signups, that change takes effect today. For existing Community subscribers, we'll be rolling out the transition over the coming weeks. You'll receive an email with the details and how to migrate.
When we launched the Community tier, the intent was to give smaller projects a meaningful on-ramp without a financial barrier. The eligibility rule was straightforward: organisations under €1 million in annual revenue, modelled on the approach Microsoft uses for similar programmes. We assumed people would be honest about it. That assumption did not survive contact with reality.
Organisations well beyond that threshold signed up anyway. We have a long list. It is not ambiguous. And even setting aside the bad actors, properly verifying revenue eligibility for thousands of signups is not something a company our size should be spending engineering and operational time on. The honour system failed, and the alternative was a manual verification burden we have no interest in taking on.
We tried technical mitigations. They helped a little, but they did not solve the underlying problem, because the issue was structural, not technical. A free commercial tier with a revenue threshold creates an inherently ambiguous enforcement position. Determined abusers will always find the path through.
Removing that ambiguity is the only real fix. Community is now non-commercial for all new signups, and existing subscribers will be transitioned in the coming weeks. The build telemetry and abuse detection systems we've developed give us a clear, reliable way to identify commercial usage on a non-commercial licence. We're not guessing. We have the data.
What we're choosing not to do is behave like Oracle about it. There will be no legal letters going out to every organisation we've identified. We're drawing a line at today and calling it a reset. That's a deliberate choice, not a concession. The customers who have paid fairly throughout all of this deserve a commercial model that actually works. Fixing it properly is how we honour that.
For organisations currently using the Community tier commercially, we will be offering a 50% transition discount on an organisational licence. Details will be included in the migration email you'll receive in the coming weeks, or you can get ahead of it by contacting us at [email protected]. The discount is reserved for organisations that qualified under the original Community terms. If you did, verification will be quick and straightforward. If you didn't, it won't be.
For those on Community for genuine non-commercial purposes, your access isn't going anywhere. You'll receive an email explaining what you need to do, but it'll be straightforward.
To Our Existing Accelerate Customers
We want to be completely explicit here, because you deserve clarity, not reassurance wrapped in caveats.
Everything we announced as part of the Accelerate roadmap will be delivered to you. All of it. The RichTextEditor, the tooling improvements, the controls we committed to: they're coming, they're included in your subscription, and that does not change. Beyond the original commitments, we're also adding Charts, which were never part of the original scope. Consider it a thank you for being with us early.
Your pricing is locked in permanently. Not a time-limited grandfather clause. Not "until we decide otherwise." Permanently. For business accounts, adding or removing seats remains available at your original per-seat price.
We'd love to see you migrate to the new tier structure eventually, and we'll offer a discount to make that easy when you're ready. But there is no pressure and no deadline. You're not being nudged, and you're not being forced. You looked after us when we were building something new. We'll look after you now that it's become something significant.
If you have any questions about what this means for your subscription specifically, reach out. We'll give you a straight answer.
Why Now
Pairing this with Avalonia 12 is not a coincidence. When 122 million builds are running across 2.1 million projects, the commercial structure around the framework has to be able to carry that weight. The old model was built for a smaller, simpler operation. This one is built for what Avalonia actually is.
Twelve is the most significant framework release in Avalonia's history. It felt right that everything around it, the brand, the pricing, the licensing, should match that ambition. Not an incremental adjustment. A clean reset.
Avalonia isn't becoming the standard for cross-platform .NET. It already is. Today, the commercial model catches up with that reality.
If you have questions about which tier fits your situation, or what this means for your existing subscription, get in touch.
The new tier structure is live. Avalonia 12 is available now. It's time to build.