How it will be licensed
Three tiers, licensed per server. Free is a real tier, not a trial — it will not expire, and a node will run on it indefinitely.
Nothing is on sale yet, and prices will be published at release. The tiers themselves are already built and enforced in the software; they are here now so they are not a surprise later.
| Feature | free | starter | pro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hosting accounts | 5 | per subscription | unlimited |
| Resellers | — | — | ✓ |
| Staging sites | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Admin-hosted services | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Git deploy | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| PostgreSQL | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multiple PHP versions | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Panel updates | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Backups, restore, escrow, certificates, export | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Prices will be published at release.
How the tiers work
Everything is per node, not per account, per domain or per gigabyte. One licence key covers one machine and everything on it.
A key says what it includes, in words you can read. The licence is a text
file with a features= line. Open it and it tells you exactly what you bought
— which is also the first thing support will ask for.
Nothing is ever removed by a plan change. Drop from pro to free and you keep every account you have, every staging site, every git deployment and every Postgres database. What changes is that you cannot create more. A node above its account ceiling keeps serving all of them and refuses the next one.
A lapse is not an outage. When a subscription ends the node falls back to free. It does not go read-only, and it has never been able to stop a website, a mailbox or a database — the licence check does not reach any of them.
What every tier includes, permanently
Backups and restore, recovery, TLS certificates, and a complete account export. On the free tier, with no subscription, forever.
That is written into the source with a test that fails if anybody adds one of them to the gateable list. A free node that cannot back up, cannot recover and cannot leave is a trap; the export is the part that makes the rest believable. If you want to go, you can, and you do not need our help or our permission to do it.
Panel updates
New panel versions are part of a paid plan. A node without one keeps running the exact version it has, indefinitely, with every escape hatch above still open — it simply stops receiving what comes next.
The fourteen days
A new installation runs with everything unlocked for fourteen days before it needs a key. That window is measured from when the node first existed, read from the panel’s own database — so reinstalling the software does not start it again. Restore a node from backup and it resumes its real age rather than being handed a fresh fortnight.