Who this is for
Platforms that already ship Statements of Work.
Most Statements of Work are written inside a system somebody else built. The standard reaches those buyers through the vendors who serve them: platforms, managed services, consultancies, staffing suppliers, and the AI drafting tools now writing first drafts.
Vendor management systems
Hold the SoW as fields rather than an attachment. Scope, acceptance criteria, and pricing mechanics each carry an element id, so compliance checks and portfolio reporting run on structure.
Contract and document platforms
Ship the Full, Medium, and Lite templates in your library, with clause libraries and approval routing keyed to the same element ids.
Managed service providers
One SoW format across your client base, with your consultants certified to write and review against it.
The licence
Where a partner agreement starts.
The standard is published under Apache 2.0, so building on the schema and charging for your product is already within the licence. Trademarks sit outside it. A product that tells its customers it carries the SoW Standard is making a claim about our standard, and that claim is what we agree with you.
No permission needed
Apache 2.0
Use, adapt, and build on the standard and its schema, in any organisation, commercial or otherwise. Roll it out across every department. Keep the copyright notice and the licence text with anything you redistribute, and state what you changed.
Agreed in writing
Anything carrying our name
Naming the SoW Standard in a product you charge for. Telling your customers that what it produces conforms. Shipping our pricing frameworks, rate cards, playbooks, or the Reference Class Forecast. Selling or embedding certification.
The agreement
What you get.
01
Named use of the marks
The SoW Standard and statementofwork.org in your product, your documentation, and your marketing.
02
Conformance review
Your templates and a sample of real output checked against the canonical register.
03
Commercial Standard content
Pricing frameworks, rate card formats, playbooks, and the Reference Class Forecast, licensed for your customers.
04
Training and certification
Verified for your customers, and the three certified tracks for your consultants.
05
A pinned schema version
Notice ahead of releases and a migration note for every change to the element register.
06
A listing here
Your platform named on this site as carrying the standard.
Fees depend on what you are building and how you charge for it. Send the request below and we will come back with terms.
How it works
Three steps.
01
Tell us what you are building
What the product does, which parts of the standard you want to carry, and roughly how many organisations it reaches.
02
Scope and terms
Which elements you implement, what your customers are told, and fees agreed in writing before anything you sell carries the name.
03
Review, then go to market
Templates and a sample of real output checked against the register. Then your platform is listed here.
What you build against
Public, and free to prototype on.
None of this needs an agreement to evaluate. Build against it, see how it fits your data model, then talk to us about naming it.
register.json
Every section and element with its stable id, level, and description, plus the engagement types and the Full, Medium, and Lite profiles.
sow.schema.json
JSON Schema (draft 2020-12) for a valid SoW instance, every element annotated with its id.
prompts/
36 prompts that cite elements by id and return JSON keyed by those ids, for any model that takes a system instruction.
api/mcp
Seven read-only tools at www.statementofwork.org/api/mcp. No account or API key needed.
Questions
Frequently asked.
Do we need an agreement to use the standard inside our own company?▾
No. Apache 2.0 covers that at any size, across every department, with no fee and no notice to us. The agreement is about what you put in front of your own customers.
We want to build a SoW module on the schema and sell it. Is that allowed?▾
Yes, provided the copyright notice and the licence text travel with anything you redistribute and you state the changes you made. Naming the SoW Standard in that product, or telling customers its output conforms, is the part we agree. Most vendors want the name, because the name is what makes the claim mean something to a buyer.
Can we ship the rate cards and playbooks to our customers?▾
Commercial Standard content is licensed by subscription and sits outside the open licence. Distributing any of it through your platform is part of a partner agreement, priced on reach.
What does conformance mean?▾
A document conforms when it satisfies the canonical schema at /schema: the element ids, the levels, and the profile derivation rules for Full, Medium, and Lite. The register is what the check runs against, which is why a review looks at real output from your platform alongside your templates.