One question we get a lot about Expo is: How much does it cost? The short answer is that it is free. We don’t charge developers anything to use it, and we don’t plan to in the future. It’s also open source so you can do whatever you want with it.

We want Expo to be really popular and feel like a standard thing to use and to have a big community of users. We want lots of questions on Stack Overflow about how to do things in Expo, etc. And we want 14-year-old girls and boys who don’t have any money to be able to build awesome stuff with it. We think the best way to achieve all those goals is to make Expo totally free and open source, so that’s what we did.

The next question we usually get after that is: how do you make money then? The short answer is that we don’t make any money and we don’t know how we will yet. We have a small team of developers who think it’s way too hard and complicated to make great software for mobile devices, and we think we’ll end up somewhere good if we can make a dent in solving that. The best idea we have right now is that if we can help developers make money, we could take a small cut of that. We keep our expenses low and so we’ll be able to fund ourselves to keep working on this the way we are now for basically along as people are interested in using it.

If you’re ever worried about Expo going in a direction that you don’t like, we also made Expo open source (BSD-licensed) so that you can do whatever you want with it — hack on it, add features that are missing, change things you don’t like, etc. And this means that even if our company disappeared somehow, the project could keep on going.