Mission
Addresses are infrastructure. A lookup should cost about as much as finding an address. You should be able to run that lookup without anyone's permission. Mailwoman provides that capability as software you run yourself.
Why the engine is open
The parser, the geocoder, the resolversresolverThe component that converts parsed address components (locality, region, postcode) into coordinates by looking them up in the gazetteer. The resolver ranks candidates by name match, population, and proximity, and returns the best-matching place with its centroid or polygon., the drop-in servers and the published model weightsmodel weightsThe learned parameters of the neural classifier, shipped as ONNX files in the @mailwoman/neural-weights-* packages. Weights are locale-specific bundles that include the model, tokenizer, and a model-card.json metadata file. are AGPL-3.0. You can read every line, fork it, and run it in production without asking us. The AGPL adds one condition. If you distribute software built on Mailwoman, or run it as a network service that other people use, those users are entitled to your corresponding source under the same license. Teams that cannot meet that condition can buy the commercial license. That license releases them from the condition.
Open source changes what a market charges for. When good editors became free, paid products moved to work that an editor cannot do by itself. We think address parsingaddress parsingThe process of decomposing a free-text postal address string into structured components — house number, street name, locality, region, postcode, and country — so a geocoder can resolve them to coordinates. should be free. We intend to make it free.
Why we charge for data and licensing rather than for calls
The engine costs money to build once. The data takes ongoing work to keep current. StreetsstreetThe named linear feature along which house numbers are ordered. Decomposes into a name plus street affixes; one of the Tier 2 fine labels. get renamed, postcodespostcodeThe country-specific postcode (US ZIP, French code postal, etc.). Mailwoman handles postcode parsing entirely by rule classifier — a regex problem, not an ML one. get reissued, and buildings get numbered, so a gazetteergazetteerA geographical index that maps place names and postcodes to real-world coordinates. Mailwoman uses a custom-built Who's On First (WOF) SQLite database as its gazetteer — the 'atlas' half of the grammar/atlas architecture. that was right last year is wrong this year in ways that no publisher announces. A subscription pays for that recurring work and for the license release that some companies need.
For that reason the price does not depend on your volume. A signup form that re-parsesaddress parsingThe process of decomposing a free-text postal address string into structured components — house number, street name, locality, region, postcode, and country — so a geocoder can resolve them to coordinates. on every keystroke makes thousands of calls per user. In your own process those are function calls. They do not appear on the invoice. We could not meter usage across your machines even if we wanted to, because the software runs on them and does not report back.
What we will not do
- Put a key on the engine. The open release contains the whole engine.
- Instrument you. The software has no telemetry, analytics or usage ping. You can verify this yourself: see Security and compliance.
- Publish a number without the script that produced it. Every accuracy figure we put out ships with its script, inputs and result file: see Benchmarks.
- Withdraw what we published. Every AGPL release already shipped stays licensed to you permanently. That follows from the license. The license leaves each grant in force after publication.
Who pays for it
Customers do. Subscriptions and enterprise work fund the engineering, so we answer to the people who use the software. We do not sell advertising or data. We do not collect queries to train modelsneural classifierThe machine learning model at the core of Mailwoman's parser — a transformer encoder (~30M parameters) trained from scratch to do BIO token classification over addresses. It learns the 'grammar' of address formats; the gazetteer supplies the 'atlas.'. The software runs on your machines, so your queries never reach us.