For a decade MinIO 30,943 was the default "S3 on your laptop". In 2025 and 2026 its company moved the free product from an open-source project to a proprietary free tier:
| Date | What changed (source: the minio/minio repository) |
|---|---|
| April 2021 | Licence changed from Apache 2.0 to GNU AGPLv3 |
| 24 May 2025 | Embedded admin console deprecated, LDAP/OIDC login moved to AIStor |
| 15 Oct 2025 | Last release (a security fix); README points to source-only releases |
| 3 Dec 2025 | README announces maintenance mode |
| 12 Feb 2026 | README: "THIS REPOSITORY IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED" |
| 25 Apr 2026 | Repository archived read-only; the mc client repository is archived too |
The maintained path is AIStor, MinIO's commercial product. AIStor Free is a "full-featured, single-node deployment", "free of charge", under the proprietary MinIO Software License ("Redistribution is prohibited"), and needs a licence file requested from MinIO's pricing page; Enterprise Lite (under 400 TiB) and Enterprise are priced on request. This book creates no vendor accounts, so it builds the last AGPLv3 release from source (MinIO in Docker). That release gets no further security fixes: acceptable on a laptop, not on a server holding real data, where SeaweedFS 35,029 (Apache 2.0) or Garage (AGPLv3, Rust) are maintained open-source alternatives. Read the AGPLv3 precisely: running unmodified MinIO as a backend is fine, but if you modify it and let users interact with it over a network, you must offer them your modified source.