Every script in our store is sold twice — once as an Open build and once as an Escrow build. Same features, same updates, different price. This is the question we get asked most, so here is the honest answer.
What escrow actually is
Escrow is Tebex's asset protection system. When a developer publishes an escrowed resource, the server-side and client-side Lua is encrypted, and it can only be decrypted by a FiveM server whose licence key matches the purchase.
What stays readable is everything the developer chose to leave outside the protected files — in practice, that means the config.
So an escrowed script is not a black box. You can still:
- Change every value in
config.lua— prices, locations, job names, timers, item names. - Add or remove entries from tables the config exposes.
- Read the exported functions and events the script documents.
- Hook into its events from your own resources.
What you cannot do is open the core logic and rewrite it.
What Open gets you
An Open build ships the Lua as plain text. Nothing is encrypted, so you can read every line and change any of it.
That matters when:
- You need behaviour the config does not expose. If you want a shop to check a gang balance instead of a bank balance, that is a code change, not a config change.
- You are integrating with something unusual. Custom inventories, custom banking, a framework fork you maintain yourself — all of these are much easier when you can see what the script expects.
- You want to learn from it. Reading working code is how most FiveM developers got started.
- You want insurance. If we stop maintaining a script, an Open build stays yours to fix. An escrowed one is frozen at whatever Tebex will decrypt.
The trade-off nobody mentions
Open builds get modified. Modified scripts drift. Six months later you update to our latest version, your changes are gone, and you have to reapply them by hand.
That is not an argument against Open — it is an argument for keeping a record of what you changed. Keep your modifications in a git repository, or at minimum in a text file next to the script. Future you will be grateful.
Escrowed scripts do not have this problem, because there is nothing to drift. You update, your config carries over, you move on.
So which one?
Buy Escrow if you configure scripts but do not write Lua, you want updates to be painless, and the feature list already does what you need. This covers most servers, and it is cheaper.
Buy Open if you have a developer on the team, you know you will need behaviour outside the config, or you want the long-term safety of owning the source.
If you are unsure, start with Escrow. The config surface is wider than people expect, and you can always come back for the Open build later.
A note on what you are allowed to do
Either build is licensed to you, not sold to you outright. Neither one may be redistributed, resold, or published publicly — that includes pasting an Open build into a public GitHub repository or a Discord server. The full terms are on our Licence Terms page.
Ask us in Discord if you want a second opinion on a specific script. We would rather point you at the cheaper build than sell you the wrong one.