Spree Commerce is an open-source headless e-commerce platform. It provides REST APIs that allow Next.js storefront developers, mobile app developers, and SaaS platforms to build commerce experiences against a shared backend.

It was created by Sean Schofield in 2007 and has since had over 800 contributors. The project has gained over 15,000 stars on GitHub, and has been downloaded over 2.7 million times from RubyGems.

Companies using Spree include Goop (company), Craftsman, Kenmore, DieHard, New England Patriots, Blue Bottle Coffee, Fortnum and Mason, GoDaddy, Everlane, and Surfdome.

Features

Spree is distributed in two editions. The Community Edition (CE), licensed under BSD-3-Clause, provides the core commerce engine. The Enterprise Edition (EE) adds commercial modules for B2B, marketplace, and multi-tenant use cases, as well as enterprise support.

Architecture

Spree exposes two REST APIs conforming to the OpenAPI 3.0 specification: a Store API for customer-facing operations (browsing, cart, checkout) and an Admin API for back-office management and third-party integrations. An official TypeScript SDK and a production Next.js storefront starter are available on GitHub under the MIT license.

Community Edition

The Community Edition includes:

  • Product catalog with variants, categories, and digital products
  • Multi-currency, multi-language support with per-market configuration (Markets)
  • Customer segments and price lists for targeted pricing
  • Promotions engine (coupons, automatic promotions, bundle pricing)
  • Order management, shipping rules, and tax calculation
  • Inventory management across multiple warehouses
  • Payment processing via Stripe, Adyen, and PayPal, abstracted through a provider-agnostic Payment Sessions API

Enterprise Edition

The Enterprise Edition adds pre-built modules for:

  • B2B commerce: buyer organizations, approval workflows, gated storefronts, custom pricing per account
  • Multi-vendor marketplace: vendor onboarding, commission management, automatic payment splitting via Stripe Connect and Adyen for Platforms
  • Multi-tenant white-label: isolated storefronts managed from a single installation
  • Security and governance: role-based permissions, audit logging, SSO, data encryption, and GDPR data export and anonymization tools

Licensing

Spree Commerce is licensed under the open-source BSD-3-Clause license — free to use, modify, and distribute for any purpose, including commercial use.

Spree ecosystem packages (starters, SDKs, payment integrations, and extensions) are licensed under the MIT license.

The Multi-Store module (spree_multi_store) is available under the AGPL v3, which is an OSI-approved open-source license, with a Commercial License option available for those who wish to keep their code changes private. Single-store installations are not affected by this.

Spree Commerce history

On July 1, 2011, Spree received $1.5 million in seed funding from AOL and True Ventures. On February 25, 2014, Spree raised an additional $5M in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital. Also participating were Vegas Tech Fund (led by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh), Red Swan (led by Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn) as well as existing investors True Ventures and AOL Ventures.

On September 21, 2015, it was acquired by First Data. After the First Data acquisition, developers from Spark Solutions and VinSol now maintain and develop the Spree Commerce Open Source project. Vinsol also develops Spree extensions.

In 2016 an OpenCommerce Conference was held in New York to showcase the newest e-commerce projects running on Spree.

In 2021, Spree transitioned from a monolithic architecture to an API-first, headless model, introducing REST APIs that decoupled the commerce backend from the frontend presentation layer. A JavaScript SDK was released to support developers building storefronts against the Spree API.

On April 2, 2025, Spree 5.0 was released, splitting the project into a free Community Edition (BSD-3-Clause) and a commercial Enterprise Edition with B2B, marketplace, and multi-tenant modules. Spree 5 also upgraded the APIs to conform to the OpenAPI 3.0 specification.

In April 2026, Spree 5.4 introduced a TypeScript SDK, a production-ready Next.js storefront starter, a provider-agnostic Payment Sessions API supporting Stripe, Adyen, and PayPal, and a Markets system for managing multiple countries with per-region currencies, languages, and payment configurations from a single installation.

See also

External links