Organisations that adopt Blender are sometimes asked to contribute financially, or are offered memberships and support under names that resemble commercial licence tiers. None of the Blender Foundation’s funding constructs changes the licence on the software. The Foundation describes itself as an independent public benefit organisation, set up in 2002, whose purpose is to provide a complete free and open-source 3D creation pipeline through public projects on blender.org.[1] This article explains the Blender Development Fund, Blender Studio and the LTS releases so that an asset manager can classify them correctly: as funding, a content subscription and a maintenance lifecycle, respectively.
The Foundation and its funding
The Foundation lists its goals as managing the facilities on blender.org for users and developers, maintaining and improving Blender through a publicly accessible source code system under the GNU General Public License, establishing funding or revenue mechanisms that serve those goals and cover its expenses, and providing individual artists and small teams with a free and open-source 3D pipeline.[1] It describes the Development Fund as its main source of income, spent mostly through Blender Institute, the working company of the Foundation, on activities around Blender such as documentation, maintaining and hosting blender.org services, organising events and administration.[1] The Foundation has published annual reports on activities and finances since 2020.[1] The history in the FAQ explains why Blender is free: the Foundation was started in May 2002 to resurrect Blender as an open-source project, a fund-raising campaign raised EUR 100,000 in seven weeks to buy back the rights, and in October 2002 Blender was released under the GPL.[6]
Development Fund
The Development Fund is a donation and membership programme. The Foundation’s page offers a one-time donation or becoming a member of the Development Fund, and the fund page credits list corporate membership levels named Corporate Patron, Titanium, Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze, alongside a Diamond level among its credits.[1][2] A donation does not carry licence rights: the licence page states that the Foundation and its projects on blender.org are committed to preserving Blender as free software, and the same GPL applies to a corporate member as to anyone who downloads the software.[5] The pages retrieved do not describe any additional use rights, source access or indemnities attached to a membership. Where a company’s procurement process requires a purchase order for software, the Development Fund is best recorded as a sponsorship or donation, not as a software licence (Blender Development Fund, Blender Development Fund membership).
Blender Studio
Blender Studio is a separate service. Its terms describe it as an open-production funding and donation platform that offers registered members access to project space and repositories of creative content and data, and state that it is an activity of Blender Institute B.V. in Amsterdam, authorised by Stichting Blender Foundation to conduct these services on blender.org.[3] Registration creates a Blender ID, which is the email-address-based identification for services on blender.org, and registration is free.[3] The Studio sells badges for supporters and members; the membership badge is based on a monthly subscription that gives access to all services of the Studio, including previous open movies, workshop videos and the current open production.[3]
The terms state membership fees as of 9 April 2020 at EUR 9.90 per month for subscriptions with automatic renewal and EUR 14.90 per month for subscriptions with manual renewal, with an additional charge on registration including a minimum of one month of fees.[3] Membership fees and supporter contributions are non-refundable, except that refunds are made without delay on a report of fraud, abuse or unauthorised use of funds, and a member may delete the account at any time.[3] Because the fee table carries a 2020 date, a reader who needs current pricing should check the Studio site; the catalog row records the date as stated (Blender Studio membership). Digital content on the Studio is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 unless notified otherwise, and the software provided there is under a free and open licence; the content licence is covered in the artwork article.[3]
A Studio membership is not required to use Blender, and the Studio’s terms say Blender Studio currently offers no additional services for Blender ID registrations, which might be offered later as opt-in with the Foundation’s approval.[3] For software asset management it is a content subscription, and it can be excluded from software licence inventories.
LTS releases
The Blender LTS program is a lifecycle policy. The Foundation says it ensures that long-lasting projects can be executed using a stable Blender version that receives critical fixes throughout a two-year period; the LTS version will have no new features, API changes or improvements, and any critical fix applied to the latest stable version is regularly ported to the active LTS releases.[4] At the time of retrieval the page listed Blender 5.2 LTS (last updated to 5.2.2 on 15 September 2026) and Blender 4.5 LTS (last updated to 4.5.14 on 15 September 2026) as currently maintained, and Blender 4.2 LTS, 3.6 LTS, 3.3 LTS, 2.93 LTS and 2.83 LTS as previous LTS releases.[4] (Blender LTS release, Blender LTS program)
LTS has no separate licence. The same GPL applies, and the download is free of charge.[6] The relevance for an asset manager is lifecycle: an LTS version defines how long security and critical bug fixes are available, which can be recorded as an end-of-support date in an inventory. The Blender Foundation’s LTS page also states that Canonical offers professional enterprise-grade support services for Blender LTS releases, and links to Canonical’s own site; this is a third-party commercial support offering and its terms are Canonical’s, not the Foundation’s (Enterprise support for Blender LTS).[4]
Downloads and mirrors
The website page names the external mirrors that distribute Blender downloads and says Blender is downloaded over 18 million times a year; it invites others to offer mirrors by contacting the Foundation.[7] Official releases from blender.org are the reference for the licence page’s privacy statements, and the Foundation recommends using them.[5]
Out of scope
This article does not cover the financial details of the Foundation’s annual reports, tax treatment of donations, the terms of third-party support providers such as Canonical, or the licence terms of products from companies that are Development Fund members. It does not describe any enterprise agreement because no Blender Foundation document retrieved offers one.