Acquia licensing

Acquia is a vendor of digital experience software built around the Drupal content management system. Its products are sold as cloud subscriptions: a managed platform for Drupal applications (Cloud Platform, Multi-Experience Operations and Site Factory), a digital asset management service (Acquia DAM, originally Widen), a customer data platform, marketing automation (Campaign Studio and Campaign Factory) and conversion optimization tooling built with Wingify. The company’s legal page lists a Subscription and Services Agreement, a Trial Services Agreement, AI Terms and terms for the self-service Acquia Cloud Professional offering as its main commercial documents.^[1] This article explains how those documents fit together and what a software asset manager needs to look for; the product-specific articles linked under See also go deeper.

Acquia licensing differs from the per-core or per-user models of traditional on-premises vendors. The customer does not receive installable software; it buys a service whose capacity is stated on an Order Form and measured by Acquia from the platform’s own logs and tooling. Compliance therefore consists mostly of watching the usage dashboards Acquia provides and understanding what the units mean, because overage fees follow from the units rather than from an audit.

Contract structure

The contract is a stack of documents. The Subscription and Services Agreement states that it governs the provision of the Services and that it takes effect on the latest signature date.^[2] Orders and Statements of Work specify what is bought. The Products and Services Guide states that Acquia contracts are made up of Order Forms signed by the customer and the scope of Services and Support documented in the guide.^[3] The guide also reserves Acquia’s right to change it to follow market practice and product evolution, with changes recorded in each document’s changelog and a promise that changes will not degrade the level of services during the period for which fees are paid.^[3]

The precedence clause matters when units conflict. In the agreement, if the agreement, the Documentation and an Order Form conflict, the Order Form or Statement of Work prevails, and terms in a purchase order are void unless they appear in an Order Form or Statement of Work.^[2] A separate glossary page states that where a term defined in a guide conflicts with the Subscription and Services Agreement or the Data Processing Agreement, the agreement controls.^[4] Practitioners should keep the Order Form, the version of each product guide in force at signature, and the agreement version together as the evidence set for each subscription.

The agreement defines “Documentation” as Acquia’s published product guides and other end-user documentation, “as may be updated by Acquia from time to time”, which is the contractual route by which the guides become binding.^[2]

Product lines

Cloud Platform Professional is a self-service offering billed monthly with usage-based resources, and its terms of service are a separate click-through document.^[5][6]

Metrics

Acquia names its units in the Products and Services Guide rather than in a single licence-definition booklet. The principal ones are:

• View and Unique Visit for Cloud Platform and Multi-Experience Operations traffic entitlements.^[7]
• Cloud Capacity Unit and Storage Capacity Limit for resource limits.^[7]
• Site Factory website and Page View (Dynamic Request) for Site Factory.^[8]
• User (Acquia DAM) for DAM Workgroup subscriptions.^[9]
• Contact and Instance (Campaign Studio) for Campaign Studio.^[10]
• Active Profile for the Customer Data Platform.^[11]
• Monthly Tracked User for Conversion Optimization.^[12]

Unlike many vendors, Acquia states for some products how its numbers can differ from the customer’s own analytics. Its Views and Visits page says that Acquia counts requests at the infrastructure level, so figures differ from client-side analytics, and that billing “will always be based on the total number of Views and Visits, and not on the numbers displayed in other analytics tools.”^[13]

Counting and floors

Counting rules are product-specific and often have tolerances. For Cloud Platform and Multi-Experience Operations, Acquia gives customers a 30% capacity buffer above the monthly traffic entitlement before overage fees apply, and requires an upgrade at renewal where the entitlement was exceeded in four or more of the last twelve months.^[7] Site Factory uses a different tolerance: under 20% above the limit in a single month is forgiven if usage then falls back, but exceeding the limit by any amount in two consecutive months makes overages applicable and backdated.^[8] New Relic APM included with the platforms follows the same 20% and two-month pattern.^[14]

Floors appear mostly as minimum tiers. The Site Factory guide states that the Enterprise 10 and 25 subscriptions are for new customers only, must be multi-year and must rise to Enterprise 100 or larger after the first year.^[8] Multi-Experience Operations tiers all include one codebase, five sites and one production environment.^[15]

Virtualization and partitioning

Acquia hosts the software, so virtualization and partitioning rules of the on-premises kind do not apply to its subscriptions. The related concepts are environments, codebases and stacks. A Site Factory stack has two environments, live and update, and the Subscription Usage page counts websites with custom domains on both.^[16] Multi-Experience Operations shares one codebase across multiple sites.^[15]

Cloud and BYOL

There is no bring-your-own-licence construct for the hosted products. The Customer Applications definition covers software such as Drupal, Node.js and Magento that the customer owns or licenses directly from a third party and runs on the platform; the subscription services themselves are not Customer Applications.^[2] The agreement lets customers choose a Data Center Region and a Fall Over Region, and states that Acquia will not move the selected region without written consent unless required by law.^[2] Acquia’s definitions page lists the AWS regions it uses across the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific and South America.^[4]

Programs

Three constructs act as programs in the catalog. The Overage Forgiveness Period suspends overage invoicing for the first three months of production traffic in the initial term unless the Order Form says otherwise.^[7] The 30% capacity buffer is described above. Trial Services are free evaluation access: the self-serve trial agreement sets a trial term of fourteen days from registration and states that trials are not for production use, while the main agreement states that Trial Services are not “Services” for warranty and indemnity purposes.^[17][2]

Commercial terms

Several clauses of the agreement drive licence management outcomes:

• Fees regardless of usage. Fees are based on the Subscription Services purchased, regardless of usage, payment obligations are non-cancelable and the purchased services cannot be decreased during the term.^[2]
• Overage billing. Customers pay additional fees when they exceed allotted capacity or other limits on the Order; subscriptions are invoiced annually in advance and overages monthly in arrears unless an Order says otherwise.^[2]
• Renewal. Subscriptions renew automatically for successive one-year periods unless either party gives notice of non-renewal at least sixty days before the term ends, and Acquia may raise renewal pricing with at least seventy-five days’ notice.^[2]
• Restrictions. Customers may not resell or sublicense the services, create a competitive offering or disclose benchmark results.^[2]
• Affiliates. Customer Affiliates may purchase services under the agreement by signing Orders, while the customer remains liable for Affiliates’ and contractors’ use.^[2]
• Assignment. Either party may assign the whole agreement to an Affiliate or in a merger not involving a direct competitor of the other party without consent.^[2]
• Exit. Customer Data and Customer Applications are available for export on request within seven days after termination or expiration, after which Acquia deletes or renders them inaccessible.^[2]
• Generative AI. AI Output may not be used to train or improve AI or machine learning systems, and Input and Output are treated as Customer Data.^[18]

Audits and compliance

The version of the Subscription and Services Agreement reviewed contains no clause giving Acquia a right to audit customer licence use; its compliance model is metering by the platform. The agreement does contain a clause allowing Acquia to compile statistical information on the performance, operation and use of the Subscription Services and to use it in aggregated form.^[2] The Cloud Platform guides state that Acquia identifies excess usage “during routine audits of Cloud Next platform utilization” and then gives the customer sixty days after notice to reduce usage or buy a Performance Boost.^[7] In practice, the main compliance exposure is therefore an unplanned upgrade or overage invoice, and the practical controls are watching usage in the Cloud Platform user interface, challenging counts against the documented definitions, and recording non-production traffic, which counts toward entitlements.^[13]

Order Forms may contain terms not visible in the standard documents, so this summary should be checked against each executed Order Form.

Out of scope

This article does not cover Drupal itself, which is open-source software governed by its own licence, nor Acquia’s partner and reseller agreements, its Professional Services statements of work, its security annexes or its Data Processing Addendum. Pricing is not published for enterprise products, so no price information is given. The Web Governance (Monsido), Source CMS and Acquia Edge products are not covered in depth because their guides were not reviewed for this article.