FiveM Script Licensing: What a Purchase Actually Grants

You are buying a licence, and the terms are the product

A FiveM script listing shows a feature list, screenshots, and a price. What you actually receive at checkout is a licence — a grant from the seller, on the seller's terms, to run their copyrighted resource under stated conditions. The seller keeps ownership. That sounds like legal pedantry until something changes: you sell the community, the seller stops updating, a refund is disputed, or an admin posts the files somewhere. At each of those moments the licence terms decide what happens, and almost nobody has read them.

This guide is about what those terms typically contain, how the technical enforcement works for escrowed resources, and which clauses to check before paying. It is written by a seller, so read it as a description of what our own terms do and what we have seen in the market, not as advice about any specific vendor's document. Terms vary; the vendor's page is authoritative for that vendor.

Two layers: the legal grant and the technical grant

The legal layer is the seller's EULA or licence page. In the FiveM market it usually grants a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to run the product for one community — the server or set of servers operated together under one Cfx account — and permits editing the open parts (config, locales, bridge glue) for that community's own use. It usually prohibits reselling, sublicensing, renting, sharing, publicly posting any part including modified open files, decompiling or defeating escrow, and building a competing derivative for distribution.

The technical layer exists only for escrowed resources. When you buy an escrowed asset through Tebex or the Cfx Marketplace, the grant is recorded against your Cfx account and visible on keymaster; the resource's encrypted files check at load that the server's licence key belongs to an account holding the grant. That is what makes escrow enforcement real — a copied folder does not start on another account's server — and it is also why a purchase linked to the wrong Cfx account is a resource you paid for and cannot run.

Open-source or unescrowed products have only the legal layer. Nothing technically stops a buyer from redistributing readable Lua, which is why open resources rely entirely on the licence text and the buyer's honesty, and why sellers who ship open bridges and configs (as we do) still license them rather than releasing them into the public domain.

Scope: what 'one licence' covers

The most common surprise is scope. 'One licence' almost never means one human and rarely means one physical server. The usual unit is one community: a production server plus that community's development and test servers, operated together under the purchasing account. A network running two unrelated cities with separate player bases is generally two communities and needs two purchases, whatever the technical binding allows.

Ask, in writing, whether staging and development servers are covered — a licence that forces you to test on production is a licence that costs you a weekend eventually. Ask whether a second key under the same account is covered. And read what the terms say about a server that changes hands, because that is the transfer question in the next section.

• Community scope: production plus dev/test servers under one account is the common shape; confirm it rather than assuming.
• Multiple communities: usually multiple licences, regardless of who owns them.
• Open parts: modifiable for your own use, still not redistributable — including modified copies.
• Public exports and APIs: you may usually build your own resources against them; check that the exports are documented and shipped open.

Updates, versions, and what you are entitled to later

A licence typically includes updates within the purchased major version — everything in 1.x if you bought 1.0. What happens at 2.0 is a seller decision: some include it, some charge an upgrade price, some never ship one. The clause to find is the one that says which. A seller with a dated, public changelog gives you a way to check that a version actually contains what its notes claim; a seller who silently swaps what a version contains has made the version number meaningless.

For escrowed assets, updates arrive through the same grant the purchase did, which is a genuine channel benefit: you are not relying on a download link on the seller's file host staying alive. For open resources, updates are files, and keeping the config you edited separate from the files the seller ships is what makes an update a diff rather than an overwrite — see the update checklist at /guides/fivem-script-update-checklist.

Transfers and resale: the answer is usually no, sometimes yes

Reselling a script you licensed — passing it to another party for payment — is outside nearly every seller's grant, and for escrowed resources it is technically impossible anyway, since the files are bound to your account. What people occasionally resell are the open files or a de-escrowed dump; both are redistribution of someone else's code and the licence terminates on it.

A licence transfer is different: when a community changes hands, some sellers will move the grant to the new owner's Cfx account on request, and the marketplace and keymaster tooling may support that for particular assets. That is a seller policy, not a buyer right. If you are buying an existing server, treat 'all scripts included' as worth nothing until each seller has confirmed the transfer — and if you are selling one, tell the buyer honestly which licences will and will not follow the server.

Revocation: how a licence ends

Licences end three ways. A refund or chargeback revokes the grant — sellers with an order system do this automatically and, in a well-built one, record the revocation on an append-only ledger rather than deleting the purchase history. A terms violation, most often leaking the resource, terminates the licence on the seller's finding; good terms say whether notice is given. And the seller can cease to exist, which no clause protects you from, and which is why the licence terms should be read alongside the seller's maintenance record and support commitments.

Our own terms are published at /legal/license and are a draft pending attorney review — they are not legal advice and they will change before launch. They are linked here because they show what a per-community grant, an included-updates clause, and automatic revocation on refund look like written down, which is the shape worth asking any seller to show you.

The clauses to find before you pay

Six clauses answer almost every dispute in advance. Find each one on the seller's page; if one is missing, ask for it in writing before checkout, and keep the answer.

• Scope — one community or one server; whether dev and test servers are covered.
• Redistribution — what is prohibited, and whether that includes modified open files.
• Updates — included within a major version, and what a major-version upgrade costs.
• Transfer — whether the grant can move to another Cfx account, and how to request it.
• Revocation — refund, chargeback, and leak clauses; whether revocation is automatic and logged.
• Escrow split — which files are open and modifiable, listed by file, not described by adjective.