Plain answers.
The questions everyone asks about a free carrier-grade gateway — licensing, money, maturity and what the catch is. (There isn't one.)
If the engine is free, what do partners actually sell?
Everything that turns software into an operation: the management portal, SLA-backed support, managed hosting, custom adapters and API dialects, SMS firewall, SS7 connectivity, migrations and compliance help. The MIT engine is complete and yours forever — partners sell certainty, not code.
Can I use Yakugate commercially without paying anyone?
Yes. The MIT license permits commercial use, modification, redistribution and even reselling — no royalties, no dual-license trap, no per-message fees. If you can run it yourself, you never owe anyone anything.
What does a distributor's 'exclusive' or territorial right cover?
The Yakugate brand, the proprietary components (portal, firewall, SS7 stack) and official partner status in a territory. It never covers the open-source engine itself — no one can hold exclusive rights to MIT code, and we wouldn't want them to.
How mature is the project?
The current release is 4.0 LTS — the first public version, built on three earlier internal generations (the public API is named v4 for a reason). The full outbound and inbound paths are built and validated end to end, with published benchmarks reproducible from the repo. As an LTS line, the v4 API contract stays stable across 4.0.x fixes and 4.x minors.
What are the real performance numbers?
Measured on one developer laptop running the whole stack: 13,435 segments/second SMPP peak, 9,196 msg/s with both edges under load simultaneously, p95 accept latency as low as 3.7 ms, and a 1.6-million-message endurance run at 100% acceptance. The benchmark tools ship in the repo so you can reproduce every number.
What infrastructure do I need to run it?
Go 1.22+, MySQL 8.0, and optionally Redis for hot-path acceleration. The gateway self-provisions its own database schema on first start. It runs on Linux, Windows and macOS, and everything fits on a single machine until you need more.
Does Yakugate send messages to phones by itself?
No — like every gateway, it needs upstream connectivity: SMPP binds or HTTP APIs from carriers and aggregators you contract with. Yakugate handles the routing, screening, delivery tracking and billing between your clients and those vendors.
What support exists if I self-host for free?
GitHub issues, community discussion, and the documentation. For guaranteed response times, production incident support, or someone to run the whole thing for you, that's what distribution partners are for.
How do I become a distribution partner?
Reach out to the founder on LinkedIn. Partnerships are being set up region by region, covering brand rights, the proprietary layer, and commercial terms per territory.
Still curious?
The code answers questions better than any FAQ — or ask the founder directly.