The code is public, the licence lets you run it on your own server, and nobody can switch it off. Here is what that buys you and where it stops.
Reloop CRM uses the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. You run it for any purpose and for any number of users, without a licence fee. If you change the code and offer the changed version to other people over a network, you publish your changes under the same licence. Using it inside your own company creates no such duty. The full text is on the open source page, and that text is the source, not this summary.
Open source is not the same as free of cost. Someone still pays for the server, the backups and the hours. The difference is who decides.
Four things you get from the licence, not from a feature list.
Your customer list lives in a Postgres database you can open, dump and move. There is no export button with a row limit.
A hosted CRM can raise the price per seat or retire the plan you are on. The version you run today runs at the same cost tomorrow.
With a hosted product you trust a privacy page. Here, you or someone you hire reads the code that touches each message.
If the maintainers stop, the code stays public and anyone can fork it. A hosted CRM that shuts down gives you a deadline.
Nobody runs it for you. You need a server, a domain and a person who is comfortable with a terminal for one afternoon. Updates are your job too. The self-hosted CRM page lists what that takes in money and time.
Support is the issue tracker, not a phone number, and the ecosystem is smaller than a large hosted CRM's. The comparison with HubSpot spells that out.
Reloop CRM is for a small sales team that already has years of email. It connects to Gmail, Microsoft 365 or any IMAP mailbox, reads the history once, and builds companies, contacts and deals from real conversations. Then it tells you which past customers went quiet and why they are worth a new call. It started inside a freight forwarding company, and that is still the clearest example of the job it does.
The honest limits: it sends no email campaigns and no sequences, there is no mobile app, and the hosted version is not open yet. It is a young project, so read the changelog before an update.
The software is. The licence fee is zero for any number of users. You pay for the server it runs on and for optional AI credits.
Only if you change the code and give the changed version to other people over a network. Running it inside your own company creates no duty to publish.
Yes. Everything sits in one Postgres database on your server. A pg_dump gives you a complete copy in one file.