You’re not free to do that “on as many machines as you want”, but there is provision for what you seek. Let me explain. 

The use of cf is covered (for most users) by the EULA that they agree to upon installing it. That document defines valid uses, including for disaster recovery, staging, and more. It also clarifies that licensing is per machine (real or virtual), and per eight cores for Enterprise but per two cores for Standard, and so on. 

There’s a different EULA for each release, but it’s not changed much in recent releases. I have a blog post on this cf portal that links to the EULA for each release, including cf2025.

And in the EULA are definitions of terms like “disaster recovery” as well as “staging” which is covered under “development software”.

Note there is also a distinction there between “development software” and “developer edition software”. The latter is one of the choices offered when installing cf: trial, development, or licensed. (As far as understanding the distinction in the EULA,  I find that if you read the words “development software” as “non-prod software”, it helps avoid confusing it with the “developer edition “.)

Finally, to your question, the EULA clarifies regarding such “development software” (such non-prod use as staging, development, etc), the license can be used once for each Enterprise license purchased, whereas for Standard it’s once for each two licenses purchased.

Of course, my wording or assertions here are not what’s binding. See the EULA yourself. It’s only a few of its dozen pages that relate to these questions.

And of course, Adobe themselves are the ultimate arbiters of covered use. You can reach out to them directly for licensing questions at adobecoldfusion@adobe.com. They tend to be very close-lipped about publicly answering licensing questions, which is unfortunate. But that’s why I point folks at the EULA.

And let me note finally that I opened saying most people run cf under that EULA (which again they agree to on installing, and which my post explains also exists as a file called license.html in the root of their cf folder.)

Who use of cf is NOT covered by that EULA? Those running cf on a hosted server, as well as those running cf via the AWS or Azure machine instances that are sold in their respective marketplaces. Those each have their own licensing and terms. Finally, Adobe also offers an ETLA (Enterprise Term Licensing Agreement) which also is different.

But if one buys cf from the cf product page on the Adobe site, the EULA above is what you agree to. Adobe may well at some point assert someone has violated the terms, in which case they will offer them the ETLA option. That process and it’s terms are not publicized. So I’ve answered you based on what is published. And again IANAL, so each must read the EULA for themselves. I just tried to offer some guidance here.