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Exepad Trademark Policy

Exepad's code is open source under the AGPL-3.0. Exepad's name and logo are also trademarks — they identify who made a thing, so using them as your brand isn't something a code licence hands over. This page explains, in plain terms, what you can do without asking.

Short version: use the code freely, and don't confuse people about who built what. Forks are welcome; they just need their own product name.

The marks

The following are trademarks of Exepad LLC, whether or not registered:

  • The name "Exepad", including spellings close enough to be confused with it.
  • The Exepad logo, including the files in .github/assets/.

Exepad LLC's own domains are exepad.com and its subdomains (including get.exepad.com, the install front door), and exepad.app and its subdomains, which serve apps published on our hosted service. A domain registration isn't itself a trademark — the mark is the Exepad name those domains carry, which is why a lookalike domain is a naming question rather than a separate right.

As permitted by AGPL-3.0 section 7(e), Exepad LLC reserves these marks. The AGPL grants you copyright and patent rights in the software; it does not grant any trademark rights, and nothing in this policy adds restrictions to your AGPL rights in the code itself.

About the logo files. They stay in this repository and stay covered by the AGPL like every other file — you may copy, fork, and redistribute them. What this policy limits is brand use: presenting the logo as the mark of your own product or service. The copyright licence and the trademark are two separate things.

What you may do — no permission needed

  • Run, self-host, modify, and redistribute the software, for any purpose, commercial included. That's the AGPL, and this policy doesn't touch it.
  • Say what your thing is. "Built with Exepad", "runs on Exepad", "compatible with Exepad", "an Exepad alternative" — accurate, descriptive references to the real project are fine.
  • Write about Exepad: blog posts, tutorials, videos, talks, courses, comparisons, reviews — including critical ones.
  • Keep the branding on an unmodified redistribution. If you mirror, package, or ship Exepad as it is, leaving the name and logo in place is exactly right — it's still Exepad.
  • Use the name in a community context — a user group, a meetup, a conference talk title — as long as it's clear you don't speak for Exepad LLC.
  • Use the logo to link to us, at its normal proportions and colours.

What needs a different name

This is about the identity you present to users. Please pick your own name and logo if you are:

  • Distributing a modified build under the Exepad name — a fork, a patched image, or a repackaging with your own changes in it. Call it something else, and describe the lineage instead: "MyBuilder, a fork of Exepad" is good; "Exepad Plus" is not. (An unmodified mirror is fine as-is — see above.)
  • Offering a hosted or managed service under the Exepad name — e.g. "ExepadCloud", "Exepad Hosting", "Exepad by <company>". "<Your Name>, hosted Exepad" describes the service accurately without claiming the brand.
  • Using the Exepad logo as the mark of your own product, or as part of your own logo, app icon, or wordmark.
  • Taking a domain, social account, or company name that reads as official — something a reasonable person would take for Exepad LLC itself, like an exepad.com lookalike or a bare @exepad handle. The problem is the confusion, not the letters.
  • Implying endorsement, affiliation, partnership, or official status that doesn't exist.

Also: don't restyle the logo (recolour, distort, add elements) and then use the result as a brand, and don't use the marks in a way that suggests Exepad LLC vouches for your product's quality or security.

Explicitly fine — you don't need to rename these

To be unambiguous, because these come up:

  • Descriptive names for unofficial work. exepad-plugin-stripe, awesome-exepad, exepad-templates, an r/exepad community, a "<City> Exepad Users" group, an @exepad_tips account. Just make it clear it's unofficial where that isn't obvious from context.

  • Internal identifiers in a fork. Redistributing a fork does not require renaming anything under the hood: the @exepad/* workspace package names, the exepad command your users type at a shell, EXEPAD_* environment variables, import specifiers, module and file paths, config keys, and table names can all stay exactly as they are. None of those is how anyone decides what to install, and renaming them would only break compatibility.

    The one name to change is the one you publish to a shared public registry, because that is how people decide: don't publish a fork to npm as exepad or under @exepad/*, and don't push its image to a registry path that reads as ours (ghcr.io/exepad/…). That's about taking our published names, not about the letters — a name of your own like exepad-plugin-stripe stays fine, per the bullet above. Publish under your own name — the command it installs can still be exepad, since a package's published name and the command it provides are set separately. Alongside that, the product you put in front of users needs its own name: the site, the install page, and the app's own UI.

Asking

If you want to do something this policy doesn't clearly allow, or you think your case is reasonable and we haven't thought of it, just ask — we're happy to grant permission for sensible uses.

info@exepad.com

We may update this policy over time; we'll keep it in this file.


Copyright © 2026 Exepad LLC. "Exepad" and the Exepad logo are trademarks of Exepad LLC.