The full AssetNode source code is now public — on GitHub and Codeberg, under the Sustainable Use License.

Self-hosting is free and unlimited: as many assets as you like, as many users as you like, on your own infrastructure. If you prefer the managed version, our cloud with primary infrastructure in Germany is still there.

Why we are doing this

IT asset management is infrastructure. It keeps the books on everything your company owns: which device sits with which person, what expires when, what has to come back when someone leaves.

Using a black box for a system like that makes little sense. You should be able to read how your data is processed instead of taking our word for it. And you should be able to leave the product without losing your history — which is exactly why self-hosting is free and not artificially capped.

That is not a marketing line, it is a question of bargaining position. A vendor you can leave at any time has to treat you well.

What "free" actually means
✅ Free and permanent for internal use inside your own company
✅ Self-host at any scale
✅ Read, audit, adapt and extend the source
✅ Pass it on free of charge for non-commercial purposes
❌ Resell AssetNode or offer it to third parties as a hosted service

That last line is the whole difference from a classic open-source licence — and the reason we deliberately decided against one.

Why not MIT or AGPL

A permissive licence lets any hyperscaler run AssetNode as their own managed service without giving anything back. For a project built by a small team in Bonn that is not a theoretical risk: it would mean the continued development of the very product you rely on becomes unfundable.

The Sustainable Use License therefore draws exactly one line: free for your own company, not free to resell. Everything else stays open.

That makes AssetNode "fair-code" rather than open source in the sense of the OSI definition. We think that is the more honest label — and we would rather say it plainly than bury it in the small print.

What is not open

Files with .ee. in the name, or inside an .ee directory, are commercially licensed and need an enterprise licence. There are no such files today. The convention is fixed from the start so it stays obvious later what belongs to the free scope and what does not — rather than repurposing existing code after the fact.

Self-hosting

You need Node 20 and a MongoDB instance:

git clone https://github.com/elixio-io/asset-node.com.git
cd asset-node.com
npm install

cp .env.example .env        # set MONGODB_URI, JWT_SECRET, JWT_REFRESH_SECRET
npm run db:setup
npm run dev:all

No MDM credentials to hand? npm run dev:mock starts every integration against simulated APIs.

Getting involved

The project is young and the rough edges are real. If you manage IT assets and something is missing or strikes you as wrong, an issue is worth more than a star.

Both repositories are kept in sync; issues and pull requests are welcome on either. If you work with an AI coding agent, AGENTS.md holds the build commands, an architecture overview and the pitfalls you cannot see from the source alone.