Licensing shouldn't be the hardest part of shipping a product. Yet for many engineering teams, that is exactly what it becomes: a slow, anxious process of royalty clauses, legal review, and seat-counting that has nothing to do with building great embedded UIs.
We've rethought how LVGL Pro licensing works, and the result is a model built around how product teams actually operate.
The same frustrations, across every company size#
These aren't hypothetical concerns. They're the conversations we have regularly with R&D managers, embedded team leads, and purchasing managers at large enterprises and mid-sized companies alike.
We spent three weeks in legal review before we could even start the project. By the time we got approval, we'd already missed a sprint.
The royalty exposure made it impossible to forecast. Finance wouldn't approve anything with a per-unit fee attached to it.
The pattern is always the same. Teams don't want to read a 40-page agreement just to find out whether they can add a developer. They don't want a different answer every time they try to map their products to a license structure. And no one wants their legal team flagging the open-source route as an M&A risk, only to pay for a commercial license retroactively in a conversation nobody enjoys.
Every product we've built at LVGL has been about making embedded UI creation simpler. Our focus on eliminating friction now extends to the purchase / licensing process too. No royalties, no complex tiers, no traps, no fine print. Just one license that covers your product during its lifetime.
One product, one license#
When your team commits to a commercial product, you get a single Product License that covers it from the first line of code to the last firmware update. Build it, ship it, iterate on it: the license travels with the product for its entire lifecycle.
The Product License is $20,000 per product. That covers up to 5 active seats and includes updates for at least 5 years, renewable after that, with application troubleshooting support from day one. No royalties.
No royalties. No fine print that comes back to bite you once you start shipping units.
A tier for every stage#
Not every team comes to LVGL Pro at the same point in their product journey, so we designed three distinct tiers.
| Tier | Best for | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community | Prototyping, personal and non-commercial use, company evaluation | Free, no expiry | Full editor access for non-commercial use, including an Evaluation License for companies; AI assistants, docs, and forum |
| Product | A single commercial product | $20,000 per product | Up to 5 seats, 5-year renewable updates, one product variant, no royalties, troubleshooting support |
| Platform | Standardizing across a portfolio | Custom | Floating and on-premise licensing, roadmap alignment, same-day-response SLA |
Community is free forever, with no expiry. Use it to prototype, evaluate, or build something for personal and non-commercial use. Companies weighing LVGL for a product can trial it under an Evaluation License on the same free, non-commercial terms until they're ready to go commercial. When that time comes, moving up to a Product License is straightforward.
Product is the core commercial license at $20K per product, to develop and maintain a product. One product, up to 5 active seats, updates for at least 5 years and renewable after that, no royalties. This is where most teams land.
Platform is for organizations standardizing LVGL across an entire product portfolio. It comes with floating and on-premise licensing, custom pricing, concurrent-seat licensing configured per organization, roadmap alignment, and strategic collaboration directly with us, backed by a same-day-response SLA.
If you have multiple products, volume discounts apply. Each additional Product License gets progressively cheaper, which adds up quickly for teams with growing portfolios. Startups and crowdfunded projects taking their first commercial steps can also ask us about case-by-case startup pricing.
Building on a Renesas platform? You can keep requesting your free yearly LVGL license for qualifying projects, just as before.
Nothing changes. Existing licenses keep working and renew exactly as before. Need more seats? You can add them anytime from your account on the website, or contact sales for help.
Enterprises have been knocking at our door, and it's been great to see how quickly LVGL Pro has been adopted. What they want is long-term licensing security, and they love that the output code runs on any hardware, so a change in their chip roadmap doesn't mean starting their UI investment over. We're excited to have a licensing model that makes standardization simpler and faster for companies of any size.
One UI layer. Every product. Any hardware.#
LVGL started as the open-source framework embedded developers trusted. It's becoming something bigger: the global standard for embedded UI, from consumer devices to safety-critical systems, from first prototype to full production fleet.
Enterprises are standardizing on LVGL not just for the tooling, but for what standardization unlocks: shared components, consistent quality, faster teams, and a licensing model simple enough to roll out across an entire organization without a legal headache.
What exactly counts as one "product"?#
This is the question we get most often, so let's be direct about it.
A Product License covers one commercially marketed product or product family. If you're selling a smart thermostat in four colors across three regions with two hardware revisions, that's one product, one license. Color, region, and hardware changes don't create new licensing obligations.
What does require a separate license is a product that's genuinely distinct in the market: a different model name, its own product page, separate sales and marketing, or a substantially different user experience. A "Standard" and a "Premium" version of a device marketed separately would generally each need a license, though if the UI is largely shared, discounted pricing applies.
We'd rather help you figure out the right structure upfront than let ambiguity slow down a deal.
Support that grows with your production needs#
Every Product License includes Basic Support: troubleshooting, onboarding guidance, and access to our docs and community. For teams moving into production, we recommend stepping up to one of our professional support tiers with an SLA.
- LVGL Care ($6,000 per product per year, up to 8 hours per month) is our most popular option for production environments. It gives you an SLA-backed one-business-day response time, direct access to LVGL engineers for troubleshooting, and bug investigation. It doesn't cover implementation or custom development, but for keeping a shipped product healthy, it's the right fit.
- Support Credits ($22,000 per 100 hours, valid for one year) work well for teams that need flexible, hands-on engineering help (UI implementation, integration support, troubleshooting) without the commitment of a dedicated resource.
- Dedicated Engineer ($22,000 per month, two-month minimum) is for teams that want an LVGL engineer embedded directly in their workflow: priority access, deep technical involvement, and direct collaboration.
Services: not sure where to start?#
If your team is new to LVGL, facing a tight deadline, or dealing with a complex UI that needs animations, custom components, or a Figma-to-production pipeline, our Services team can step in. We work alongside you from concept to shipped product, so you're not figuring it out alone.
Typical engagements include UI concept and evaluation, Figma-to-UI implementation, prototype and MVP builds, full product UI development, and long-term UI evolution. Engagements are scoped to your needs:
- Small projects start at $15–25K
- Medium projects at $25–50K
- Larger builds from $50K+
Bring in the Services team and the Product License comes bundled at a discount. You won't pay full price for both.
Training: get your team up to speed fast#
Adopting a new UI framework across a team carries real risk: slower onboarding, inconsistent implementation, and more support calls down the line. Training addresses all of that upfront. Most teams start with a one-to-two-day workshop and leave with the confidence to move fast independently.
Workshops run one to three days, delivered remotely or on-site worldwide. For larger organizations rolling out LVGL across multiple teams, custom multi-session programs are available. Pricing covers groups of up to five people, and reasonable travel costs apply for on-site delivery. The outcome: faster onboarding, fewer support needs, and better UI quality from day one.
Why we built it this way#
Licensing complexity is a known pain point in the embedded UI space. Per-device royalties create unpredictable costs at scale. Open-source routes carry obligations that regularly require legal advice to navigate correctly. Restrict access to long-term support releases and teams push back hard. Get the license choice wrong and you can inherit real liability during an acquisition. The pattern is clear: licensing friction is a real cost, not just an inconvenience.
The most common feedback we heard from engineering managers was that licensing complexity, not price, was the biggest barrier to adoption. Teams would spend weeks in legal review, finance would struggle to model royalty exposure, and deals would stall for reasons that had nothing to do with whether LVGL was the right technical choice.
We don't want you spending more time understanding your license than building your product. LVGL Pro is designed to accelerate your development, not just through professional tooling, but through licensing that's simple enough to explain in a five-minute conversation. You shouldn't need a lawyer to figure out if you're compliant.
Simple licensing ships faster#
A model that's easy to understand moves faster through procurement: easier for finance to budget, easier for legal to approve, easier to explain to your CTO in five minutes. Less time navigating licensing means more time building and a faster path to market.
I am very excited about this model. Less paperwork, more time for valuable work. Less time navigating licensing means more time building and a faster path to market.
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