iText license and iTextSharp license cost explained: what every .NET PDF library actually charges for commercial use

A .NET PDF library is one of the few dependencies where the license, not the feature list, decides whether you can ship. Most of them will render your invoice perfectly well. The difference is what happens afterwards: whether you owe nothing, owe a few thousand dollars, or owe the world your source code. That last one catches more teams than anyone likes to admit, because the library involved is the one that has been the default answer in .NET for twenty years.

Here is what each of the main options actually costs a closed source commercial application, read from the vendors own sites and repositories on 9 August 2026.

The short version

iText for .NET is dual licensed AGPL and commercial, and the AGPL requires you to publish the source of your own application if you deploy it on a network. Its commercial pricing is quote only. QuestPDF is free under 1M USD in annual gross revenue, then 1,999 USD for Professional or 4,999 USD for Enterprise. IronPDF starts at 999 USD perpetual with no free production tier. PDFsharp and MigraDoc are plain MIT with no conditions at all. Syncfusion has a free community license with three separate ceilings plus a funding history test.

Library	License	Cost for a closed source commercial app	The catch
iText 7 and iTextSharp	AGPL v3 or commercial	Quote only, no published price	AGPL requires publishing your own application source
QuestPDF	Source available, dual licensed	Free under 1M USD revenue, then 1,999 or 4,999 USD	Public sector and publicly traded companies are excluded from the free tier
PDFsharp and MigraDoc	MIT	Free, unconditionally	No HTML support and a lower level API
IronPDF	Commercial, perpetual	999 to 4,799 USD by developer and project count	No free tier for production, only a 30 day trial
Syncfusion	Community or commercial	Free only if you clear every community condition	Revenue, headcount, developer count and past funding all tested

Is iTextSharp free for commercial use?

Not for closed source software. The iText for .NET repository states that the library is "dual licensed as AGPL/Commercial software" and explains that "The AGPL is a copyleft license, which means that any derivative work must also be licensed under the same terms." iText own licensing page is blunter about the practical consequence: "You may not deploy it on a network without disclosing the full source code of your own applications under the AGPL license", and "You must distribute all source code, including your own product and web-based applications."

The word doing the damage is network. The GPL is triggered by distributing software, which is why plenty of teams have quietly used GPL components in server side code for years without consequence. The AGPL closed that gap deliberately: users interacting with your software over a network counts. An ASP.NET Core service that generates a PDF invoice for a customer is exactly the scenario the clause was written for. There is a further obligation people miss, which is that you must keep the producer line and copyright notice in the PDF metadata, so stripping the branding from output files is itself a violation.

Applied honestly to a normal SaaS product, that means using iText under the AGPL obliges you to open source your application. Not the PDF module. The application.

What does an iText commercial license cost?

iText does not say. The buying page lists two commercial routes, an OEM distribution license and a volume based annual subscription priced on the quantity of PDF files processed, and both are listed as custom pricing with a request a quote button. There is no rate card, no starting price and no calculator.

That is a legitimate business model, and for a large enterprise with a procurement function it is unremarkable. It is a genuine problem for a small team trying to decide between four libraries in an afternoon, because you cannot compare iText against a 1,999 USD QuestPDF license or a 999 USD IronPDF license without opening a sales conversation first. If you are early in a build and need a number for a budget, iText is the one option here that cannot give you one.

Was iTextSharp not free before?

It was, and this is the root of most of the confusion. Releases up to iTextSharp 4.1.6 were available under the LGPL and MPL, which are permissive enough for commercial closed source use. Everything from iText 5 onward is AGPL. That change happened in 2009, and the internet never caught up: a large amount of the sample code, tutorial content and Stack Overflow advice that ranks well today was written under the old terms and does not mention licensing at all.

The rule that matters is simple. The license that applies to you is the one attached to the package version you actually installed, not the one that applied to the code sample you copied. Finding an old iTextSharp reference in a legacy project does not mean the old terms carry forward to new work, and pinning to 4.1.6 to stay on the LGPL means running a library that has had no security maintenance in well over a decade, which trades a legal problem for a worse one.

If you have inherited a solution large enough that nobody knows what is in it, this audit is mechanical rather than difficult, and it is the sort of sweep where an AI coding assistant can inventory every package reference across hundreds of csproj files faster than a developer opening them one at a time. The judgement call at the end of it is still yours.

Is QuestPDF free for commercial use?

Yes, below a revenue line, and the terms are unusually clearly written. The QuestPDF README states the library is "free for individuals, non-profits, open-source projects, and organizations under $1M in annual gross revenue". Above that threshold the published prices are 1,999 USD for a Professional license, described as covering "one legal entity shipping PDFs in production, every developer covered at one flat, predictable price", and 4,999 USD for Enterprise where a corporate group needs affiliate wide coverage.

Three details are worth reading before you assume you qualify. First, the Community license is explicitly not open source in the OSI sense. Its own text says "This is a source-available commercial license. It is not an OSI-approved open-source license, and the MIT License does not govern use of the Software under this Community License." If your organization has a policy that only permits OSI approved licenses, QuestPDF fails that test even though it is free.

Second, public sector entities and publicly traded companies are ineligible for the Community license regardless of revenue. A small government agency does not qualify on any revenue argument.

Third, and to QuestPDF credit, crossing the threshold is handled gracefully. There is a 90 day transition period to buy a license or stop using it, with no back payments, penalties or fees for the period when you did qualify. Compared with discovering an AGPL obligation during due diligence, that is a soft landing.

What is the cheapest .NET PDF library with no license conditions?

PDFsharp, with MigraDoc on top of it. The project README states it is "Published Open Source under the MIT License", and MIT means what it says: no revenue ceiling, no headcount test, no disclosure obligation, no funding history clause, no transition period. You can ship it inside a closed source commercial product at any scale and owe nothing to anyone, forever.

You pay for that in ergonomics. PDFsharp is a drawing API where you position content on the page yourself, and MigraDoc adds the document model with paragraphs, tables and styles that most people actually want. It works, the output is small and fast, and it has a long track record. It is simply less pleasant to write than QuestPDF fluent API, and neither layer will ever accept HTML.

The practical split between the two free options: if you are under 1M USD in revenue and expect to stay there for a while, take QuestPDF for the better API. If you are large, publicly traded, public sector, or you would rather not have a licensing question resurface during a funding round or an acquisition audit, PDFsharp removes the question entirely.

What does IronPDF cost?

IronPDF publishes its prices, which puts it ahead of iText on transparency. The perpetual tiers as listed on 9 August 2026 are Lite at 999 USD for one developer, one location and one project, Plus at 1,499 USD for three of each, Professional at 2,399 USD for ten of each, and Unlimited at 4,799 USD. There is a 30 day free trial with full functionality and no deployment restriction, but no free tier for production use.

What you are buying is different from what the code first libraries offer. IronPDF bundles a Chromium engine, so it renders real HTML and CSS with JavaScript, and the text stays selectable. That is a capability QuestPDF and PDFsharp do not have at any price. If your source document is a Razor view or an existing HTML template, the comparison is not IronPDF against QuestPDF on cost, it is IronPDF against the other ways of getting a browser engine involved.

Who qualifies for the Syncfusion community license?

Fewer teams than expect to. Syncfusion states the free community license is for "Companies and individuals with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue, 5 or fewer developers, and 10 or fewer total employees", and adds that an entity "may not have ever received more than $3,000,000 USD in capital from an outside source, such as private equity or venture capital".

Read those as four independent gates, all of which you must pass. A twelve person consultancy with 600,000 USD in revenue fails on headcount. A six person startup with two developers and 200,000 USD in revenue fails if it once raised a 4M USD seed round, because the funding test looks at history rather than current state. The word ever in that clause means a company cannot become eligible again by spending the money.

The licensing question that decides your architecture

Step back from the individual prices and a pattern appears. Every library that accepts HTML and CSS either costs real money or carries a copyleft obligation. Every library that is genuinely free with no strings makes you build the document in code instead. That is not a coincidence: an HTML renderer needs a CSS engine, and maintaining one is expensive enough that somebody has to fund it.

Which means the licensing decision and the architecture decision are the same decision, and it is worth making it in the right order. Ask first where your document comes from. If it is assembled from database rows and no HTML template exists, the free options are genuinely good and you should take one. If your document is already a Razor view, an email template or a page in your app, then rebuilding that layout in C# to stay on a free license means maintaining two versions of the same design forever, and the license you saved buys you a permanent maintenance cost instead.

There is a third route that changes the shape of the question, which is to keep the browser out of your codebase entirely and call a rendering service over HTTPS. There is no NuGet package with a license attached, nothing in your deployment artifact, and no Chromium to patch when the next CVE lands. It is a subscription rather than a perpetual license, and it is a network call rather than an in process call, so it is not free and it is not right for everything. But it does remove the entire category of problem this article is about.

Whichever way you go, the full C# PDF library comparison puts all six routes side by side on what each renders as well as what each costs, the Blazor HTML to PDF page covers how your hosting model rules some of these options out before licensing even comes up, and PDF API pricing normalizes what the hosted vendors charge per 1,000 documents so you can compare a subscription against a perpetual license on the same axis. The iText clause discussed here is not specific to .NET, because it is the same product and the same dual license on the JVM, so if your codebase is Java the Java PDF library comparison applies the same analysis to Apache PDFBox, OpenPDF, Flying Saucer and iText 8.

One commercial option deliberately left out of the table above is Aspose.PDF, because it is priced on a different axis again. Where iText will not quote without a conversation and QuestPDF keys off your revenue, Aspose publishes six perpetual tiers outright, from $1,199 to $59,950, and scopes them by how many developers touch the project and how many buildings those developers sit in. For a small distributed team that arithmetic can be more expensive than the headline suggests, and we worked through every tier and the rules behind them on our Aspose PDF pricing page.

One closing note on doing this properly. Every figure above was read from the vendor own site or repository on 9 August 2026, because software licensing changes and secondhand summaries go stale quietly. QuestPDF revenue threshold, iText AGPL terms and IronPDF tiers have all moved at some point in the past few years. Before you commit a budget or a legal position, open the vendor license page yourself and check the date.