Commercial & Sponsorship
Everything Cefrium publishes is free and stays free. What can be paid for is a commitment — a response time, contractual terms, prioritized engineering — and those are agreed per case by email rather than listed as prices.
Cefrium is free, and stays free
Cefrium is licensed under LGPL-3.0-or-later. You can ship it in a product, including a commercial product you charge for, at no cost and with no registration, no license key and no usage reporting. The terms are set out on the policy page.
The published SDK is the whole SDK. Both variants
(cefrium-sdk and cefrium-sdk-libre), every ABI in the
artifact, the Compose API and the Gradle plugin are in the same public release that
everyone resolves from Maven Central. There is no reduced community edition, and no
feature on this page is withheld from it.
The maintenance everyone gets also stays as it is: Cefrium tracks upstream CEF release branches, an engine update carries the Chromium security fixes of the revision it pins, and those arrive in the next release rather than as backports to older versions. That work is best-effort, in the tradition of upstream CEF, and the cadence it has actually kept is visible release by release on the releases page.
Nothing below removes anything from that. The free path is not a trial and not a lead generator. If best-effort maintenance is good enough for your deployment, use Cefrium and ignore this page.
Sponsor the project
Cefrium is maintained by one person. The recurring cost is not writing features: it is tracking Chromium stable, re-validating every carried patch against each new engine, keeping CVE parity, and testing on real devices across the Android OEM matrix. Sponsorship is what makes that cadence sustainable rather than opportunistic.
This is also how the upstream project is funded. CEF combines recurring donations with per-feature sponsorship from the companies that depend on it, and Cefrium follows the same model: a general contribution supports the cadence, while specific work is funded as described under feature sponsorship below.
Recurring support goes through Liberapay, at liberapay.com/cefrium. Liberapay takes no platform fee, so apart from the payment processor's cut the whole contribution reaches the project, and it is itself a non-profit running on public code. Weekly, monthly or yearly, and you can stop it at any time.
Liberapay funds the cadence. It is not the channel for a contract: priority support, a response-time commitment or sponsored engineering are arranged by email, as described below.
Commercial support
The following are available to teams running Cefrium in production. Pricing is by arrangement, because the engagements are not comparable: a fleet of several hundred locked-down kiosks and a single app embedding one browser view need different commitments. Email describes the deployment, and the terms follow from it.
| What | What it means |
|---|---|
| Priority support | A private channel to the maintainer, ahead of the public issue tracker, with an agreed response time. |
| Security-response commitment | A contractual timeline from an upstream Chromium security release to a Cefrium build carrying that engine, delivered to you. This is the paid answer to the best-effort limitation above: the free cadence has no SLA, and a contract is the only honest way to give one. |
| License terms | Alternative terms for teams that cannot meet the LGPL obligations in their distribution model, and written answers for a procurement or compliance review. |
| Integration work | Help embedding Cefrium: migrating off the System WebView, off-screen rendering, the process and memory model, kiosk lockdown, and bringing up a new device or OEM. |
A deployment that needs a signed statement of a release's network behaviour, or a validated configuration for an air-gapped install, is the same conversation — see the network behaviour guide.
Feature sponsorship
Specific engineering work can be sponsored in order to prioritize it. This is ordinary practice in this ecosystem: companies have funded the CEF Python releases they needed, including support for platforms the maintainer would not otherwise have carried.
Work that can be sponsored, stated as what it is rather than as a roadmap promise:
- A build with proprietary codecs such as AC3 and EAC3. The official builds deliberately omit them, for the patent-licensing reasons on the policy page; sponsorship funds the engineering, and the licensing obligations remain with whoever distributes the result.
- Additional ABI coverage, for example
armeabi-v7afor 32-bit ARM devices. - A lower
minSdk, or a documented fallback strategy for Android versions below the current floor. - A guaranteed-cadence security build stream on a schedule you can plan a release train around.
Sponsoring a feature funds both writing it and keeping it alive — a change carried against every future Chromium release costs more over time than the first implementation did, and the arrangement has to cover that. Scope is agreed before anything starts.
Contact
One address for commercial, support and sponsorship inquiries: cefrium@proton.me.
It helps to include, in the first email: what you are building, roughly how many devices and which OEMs, the Cefrium version you are on or evaluating, and which of the items above you need. That is usually enough to answer with concrete terms instead of questions.
The maintainer's OpenPGP key is on the about page if you would rather send it encrypted.