Nadine is free to download, but not free to run. Think of it as the difference of owning your own home vs renting an apartment. You can paint the rooms any color you want or even tear out the walls and install skylights but you are also on the hook if/when those skylights leak or the water heater explodes.
To run Nadine you will need a hosting service ($), someone who is technically savy who can help you install the software and respond to technical problems ($$), and someone to fix bugs and implement any customizations you want ($$$).
So sorry, this isn't a free ride but it is an opportunity to collaborate with the world wide coworking community and support the spirit of open source software.
Normally the cost of writing your own software platform would be prohibitively expensive. Nadine can greatly accelerate this process and overcome many of the ongoing maintenence challenges by distributing the load. That is the power of open source!
You can get started by joining the discussion group or the #nadineproject channel on the Coworking Leadership Slack group. You can downloading the full source code on GitHub.
If you would like to talk more about this, you can contact Jacob and the Kanawha Design Studio team over at kanawha.design.