Can You Use a Purchased App Template for Client Work? Licenses Explained

If you run an agency or freelance, the license is the part of a template purchase that decides whether the deal works at all. A template that saves you three weeks is worthless if you cannot legally deliver the result to the client who is paying you.

The good news is that template licenses are less varied than they look. Almost all of them fall into three families, and almost all commercial ones are built on the same idea. Learn that idea once and you can read any template license in a few minutes.

The three kinds of template license

Open source is the most permissive. The MIT license lets you use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies of the software, on the single condition that the copyright and permission notice stays with it. Build ten client apps from one MIT starter and you owe nobody anything but that notice.

Single-use commercial licenses grant one end product per purchase. You can make money with that product in any way you like, and you can usually build it for a client, but each additional product is another purchase.

Envato's tiers add a second axis: who pays. On ThemeForest and CodeCanyon, the Regular license covers use in one end product that is free to its end users, and the Extended license covers one end product that is sold. Both are still one end product per license. Envato states plainly that you may charge a client for your services in creating an end product under the Regular license, and equally plainly that one license cannot be used across multiple clients or jobs.

The idea every commercial license rests on

Every commercial template license separates two things: the template, meaning the files as a starting point for building software, and the end product, meaning the working application you build from them.

Merkado's license puts the distinction in one sentence: the difference between the Template and an End Product is purpose, not file contents. The same folder of code can be either. Handing someone a finished application to run is delivering an end product. Handing someone those same files so they can build something else from them is distributing the template.

Once that clicks, almost every question answers itself. Selling access to your app, charging subscription fees, delivering a finished build to a client: all of these are things you do with an end product, and they are allowed. Selling the code as a starter kit, publishing it for others to build from, or reusing it for another client's app: all of these treat the files as a template again, and they need another license or are not allowed at all.

What one Merkado license covers

Merkado sells every Merkado Original under the same single-use commercial license (version 1.1, in force since September 29, 2026). One purchase covers one end product, which can be your own or a client's. Within that one product, the license spells out that you get:

• Unlimited users, customers, and tenants, with no per-seat fee. A multi-tenant deployment operated as a single product counts as one end product.
• Any number of development, testing, staging, preview, and demo environments.
• Backups, forks, and private copies kept for your own use.
• Employees and contractors working on the product on your behalf, as long as they use the template only for that product.
• Modification by AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot. Giving the code to an AI tool in order to change it for your product is expressly permitted.
• Rebranding, restyling, and renaming, including removing any Merkado credit from what you deploy.

What it rules out is narrow: you may not resell, redistribute, sublicense, or republish the template files, on their own or bundled into another starter kit, and you may not list the template or a starting-point derivative on any marketplace or template store. Those restrictions govern the template, not your product. You may operate what you build commercially, sell access to it, and license it to your own customers on whatever terms you choose.

Building for a client: the handover

This is where many licenses get vague, and where an agency gets stuck. A license that lets you build for a client but forbids giving the files to anyone leaves you unable to hand over the repository the client just paid for.

Merkado's license answers it directly. If your end product is a client project, you may transfer it to that one client, including its full source code, permanently. On delivery, the client receives its own license to possess, operate, modify, and maintain that one product, itself or through contractors of its choosing, for as long as it likes.

Two limits apply. The client gets no right to use the template to build anything else, and no right to pass the template on. And delivering a project does not free your license up for reuse: each end product needs its own license, delivered or not.

What counts as one project

The scenarios agencies and founders actually ask about, under Merkado's license:

The multi-tenant row surprises people. If you run one client portal and give each of your clients a login, you are operating one product with many tenants, which is one license. If you deploy a separate, rebranded copy for each client, each copy is its own end product.

Open-source code inside a commercial template

A commercial template is rarely all original code. A typical Next.js app pulls in hundreds of open-source packages, mostly under MIT or Apache 2.0. A well-written commercial license says so, and confirms that those packages keep their own licenses.

Merkado's license does exactly that: the restrictions cover the Merkado-authored code only, and nothing in it limits the rights the open-source licenses give you. Your one obligation is to keep those packages' notices intact, which happens automatically as long as you do not strip them out of the dependency tree.

Five questions to ask before buying any template

1. How many end products does one purchase cover? Look for the word "one" or "single". If the license does not say, assume one and ask.
2. Can the end product charge its users? On Envato this decides Regular versus Extended. Many commercial licenses, Merkado's included, allow it at no extra cost.
3. Can I hand the source code to a client? If the answer is not explicit, get it in writing before you quote the job. This is the clause that most often blocks agency work.
4. Can I use AI coding tools on it? Some licenses are silent on this. Since nearly every developer now does, prefer licenses that permit it in writing.
5. Do the listing and the license file agree? If a product page says one thing and the bundled LICENSE file says another, ask the seller which governs before you pay. On Merkado, the license file states that the Terms of Service control if the two ever conflict.

Pricing client work around a license

The clean way to handle a per-project license in an agency quote is to treat it as a pass-through cost: one license per client, listed as a line item next to hosting and third-party services. At one-time template prices of $129 to $499, it is usually a small fraction of the build fee, and it keeps each client's project clearly licensed in that client's name.

If you expect to deliver the same template to several clients, ask the seller about volume pricing. For Merkado templates, email hello@merkado.ai.

The fine print

This article summarizes Merkado's license and Envato's published terms as of October 2026. It is not legal advice, and the license text and Terms of Service are what govern. Purchases made on Merkado before September 29, 2026 stay governed by the license terms in force when you bought, and that earlier wording is kept on the Terms page. For a broader view of when buying a template beats building, see our buy vs build guide.