Why We're Not a Frappe Partner — and the One Requirement We Won't Meet

The Frappe partner requirements are published openly. There are three of them. We meet two comfortably and would happily meet them in writing. The third is the one we decline, and it is worth explaining precisely, because it is not about our engineering.

What are the Frappe partner requirements in 2026?

Frappe lists three eligibility criteria in its partner guide:

1. A registered company. "You need to own an IT services business verifiable via a website and if required, some additional company proofs verifying the registered company address."
2. Certified staff. "You must have at least two full-time team members who are certified in ERPNext or the Frappe Framework." Only complete certifications count — single-module and associate-level certificates are excluded.
3. Frappe Cloud revenue. "You should already have Frappe customers amounting to more than $100 per month on Frappe Cloud."

The first two describe the firm. The third describes the firm's customers.

Tier is then set by how much of that hosting revenue you generate, per Frappe's published plans:

To be fair to the programme, revenue is not the only thing that moves you up at the top. Silver additionally requires a Partner Maturity Model audit — a real review of delivery process, described in Frappe's Silver tier documentation. Gold requires a higher one. We cover how that audit works in our explainer on Frappe and ERPNext partner tiers.

But the audit sits on top of the revenue floor. It never replaces it. No amount of process maturity gets you listed without the hosting spend underneath.

Why can't we simply pay the partnership fee?

Because there isn't one any more.

This is the part people miss. We would pay a fair annual fee tomorrow. We would pay a larger one than $1,450. That option no longer exists.

Removing the fee genuinely did make the programme more accessible — for firms that resell hosting. For a firm that does not, it removed the only door that was ours to open.

What does the hosting requirement ask of your clients?

It asks them to buy a particular hosting product so that we can hold a badge.

Frappe's Silver documentation notes the revenue "includes revenue from both directly and indirectly billed accounts." So it does not matter whether the client pays Frappe or pays us and we pay Frappe. What matters is that the workload runs on Frappe Cloud.

That is the line for us. Our entire pitch is that you own your stack — source, data and infrastructure — with no vendor lock-in and no per-seat licensing. Clients hire us specifically to self-host. If our partner status depended on ₹10,000 a month of their hosting spend, then every hosting conversation we have would carry a conflict we would be obliged to disclose.

We are not claiming this is impossible for us. Entry tier needs roughly $100 a month — two or three small sites. We could reach it inside a quarter by steering a handful of accounts. We choose not to, because the reason for steering them would be our marketing, not their requirements.

Is Frappe wrong to run the programme this way?

No, and we want to be careful here.

ERPNext is genuinely free software under GPLv3. Nobody pays a licence fee, ever. That is the reason we build on it. But somebody has to fund the engineers who write it, and Frappe Cloud is how Frappe does that. Rewarding the partners who fund the product is a coherent, defensible model — the same one GitLab, Discourse and Sentry use.

Frappe is entitled to design its programme around the revenue that sustains the product. Our disagreement is not that the rule is unfair. It is that the rule and our business model are incompatible, and pretending otherwise would help nobody.

Two things follow that we will not say:

• We will not say Frappe partners are worse implementers. Many are excellent, and Silver and Gold firms have passed a process audit we have not.
• We will not say Frappe Cloud is a bad product. It is a strong managed platform, and when a client wants managed hosting from the people who write the software, it is often the correct recommendation. We have made that recommendation and will again.

What we do say is narrower and, we think, useful: a partner tier reliably tells you a firm routes hosting revenue to Frappe. It does not tell you the firm is a better fit for your project than a firm that doesn't.

What does Mithtech do instead?

Everything the programme asks for, minus the client-purchasing condition. Specifically, we commit to:

1. Paying a standard partnership fee — at the old $1,450 level or higher — if Frappe ever reinstates a fee-based path that does not route through client hosting spend.
2. Contributing upstream through code, reproducible bug reports and patches against ERPNext and the Frappe Framework.
3. Supporting the community on the forum and in issue threads, where most people actually get unstuck.
4. Certifying our team through Frappe School, to the complete ERPNext and Frappe Framework certifications the programme requires — not single-module certificates.
5. Recommending Frappe Cloud when it fits, judged on the client's needs, with no badge riding on the outcome.

That last one is the point of the whole exercise. We are happy to send business to Frappe Cloud. We are not willing to owe our credentials to it.

How should you judge an ERPNext vendor without a badge?

Verify the things that predict whether your project succeeds. None of them appear in a directory listing.

• Ask to see a live system. Not slides — a running instance with real data flows, screen-shared.
• Ask who does the work. Get the names of the people on your build, not the headcount of the firm.
• Ask for a written scope with fixed deliverables and a change-control process before you sign anything.
• Ask what happens in month three. Post-go-live support is where most ERP implementations quietly fail.
• Ask where the code lives. You should get a repository you own, on infrastructure you control.
• Ask about the exit. A vendor confident in their work will tell you exactly how you would leave.

Cross-check any partner claim against Frappe's official directory. If a firm advertises a tier it does not hold, that is a straightforward integrity signal — which is precisely why we would rather publish this page than let you find our absence and wonder.

For the wider set of questions buyers raise about open-source ERP, see ERPNext buyer objections answered, our guide to choosing an ERPNext implementation partner in India, and the Frappe and ERPNext platform page.

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