License Terms

This page states what a Canvas license grants, how many sites it covers, and which terms apply depending on where you bought it. The practical pages sit alongside it: Plans And What A Site Means for how seats are counted, How To Activate Your License for the License screen, and Refunds And Renewals for the refund window and renewal pricing.

The Software Is GPL

Canvas ships as two WordPress packages, a theme and a plugin. Both are licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later, stated in the theme's style.css and the plugin's header. Every third party asset bundled with them is compatible with that license and credited in the theme's readme.txt.

That license is not a choice we made for marketing reasons. Code derived from WordPress inherits the GPL, and the freedoms it grants, to run, read, modify and redistribute the code, are yours and cannot be narrowed by anything on this page.

What a license key governs is the service: updates, demo imports, AI generation, premium editing in the editor, and support. Those run on our servers, and the site allowance below is the term on which we provide them.

Site Allowance By Plan

Every plan is an annual license bought through your Canvas account. The allowance is the number of production sites you may activate at one time:

Starter covers 3 sites.
Pro covers 10 sites.
Agency covers 100 sites and adds multisite network activation.

A development or staging site does not spend an activation. Seats are released when you deactivate a site, so an allowance is a concurrent limit rather than a lifetime count. Plans And What A Site Means sets out exactly what counts as a site and how a seat is freed.

The White Label Add-on is an account level option that removes Canvas branding from the admin. It grants no site activations of its own.

If You Bought Through ThemeForest

A purchase made on ThemeForest is governed by the Envato Standard License for that item, not by the plan ladder above. The terms are Envato's and are published in full at themeforest.net/licenses. In summary, and without replacing that text:

The license covers one end product, meaning one site.
The license is perpetual. It does not expire, and the site keeps working.
Support is time boxed to the period included with the item, while item updates continue.
You may build the site for a client, and the client may take ownership of it.
You may not resell or redistribute Canvas itself as a competing product.

Exchange your Envato purchase code in your Canvas account to activate the site. The result is a one site perpetual entitlement, which is a different shape from the annual plans: it does not renew, and it does not accrue AI credits or demo access beyond what the item includes.

If you need more than one site, buy an annual plan here rather than buying the item repeatedly.

What Happens When A License Ends

An annual license that lapses leaves your site rendering permanently. Premium blocks keep displaying, imported demos keep working, and no visitor sees a change. What pauses is the service: updates, demo imports, AI generation, premium editing, and support. What Happens When A License Expires covers each effect and how expiry differs from a site that was never activated.

A refund is the exception, because a refund undoes the purchase: activations stop verifying and download access is withdrawn.

A ThemeForest license does not expire, so none of the above applies to it.

What We Do Not Do

Some absences are commitments worth stating:

Canvas does not contact our servers when a visitor loads your site. License checks happen in the admin, on a schedule, never on a front end request.
Canvas does not obfuscate or encrypt its code. Every line that runs on your server is readable, which the GPL requires and which we would do anyway.
Canvas does not disable your site, at expiry or at any other time.

Where These Terms Sit

This page describes how Canvas works and is written to match what the software does. It is a plain description rather than a contract, and it does not replace the purchase terms shown at checkout, the Envato license for a ThemeForest purchase, or any agreement signed with us.

If something here does not match what your site does, report it rather than working around it. Support is at support.canvaswp.com.