Free protocol. Paid trust.
An open standard that charges for adoption dies. We give away the thing that should spread and charge for the things that need a counterparty: certification, deployment and settlement.
| Line | Price | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Protocol, standards and conformance kit | $0, perpetual | The standard is the distribution. No lock-in to object to. |
| Design-partner pilot | $15k – $25k one-off | 30 days, capped per transaction, kill criteria visible before you sign. |
| Conformance certification — L1 Value Core | $5k / year | Per rail or service. Value semantics, state machine, conservation. The kit is runnable today. |
| Conformance certification — L2 Agency | $15k / year | Adds charter-bound funding, caps and human-threshold co-signature. Specified; kit not yet shipped, so not yet certifiable. |
| Conformance certification — L3 Cross-rail | $30k / year | Adds two-phase commit, abort-bond accounting, bonded convergence. Specified; kit not yet shipped. |
| Audit-linked certification tier | +$20k / year | Certification bound to an external audit report rather than self-attestation. Available once an external audit exists; none does yet. |
| Settlement fee | 15 bps · $0.10 min · $25 cap | On escrowed volume. Against ACH at a flat $0.20 to $1.50 this is MORE expensive on a $2,400 ticket, not less; the calculator subtracts it and says where it turns negative. |
| Operator — Operator | $99 / month | 50,000 machine requests a month, enforced. No SLA at this tier. |
| Operator — Operator Pro | $499 / month | 500,000 machine requests a month, enforced. Support: Priority support. No availability target yet: /status publishes live health, and we will not publish a target until we have twelve months of it. |
| Operator — Enterprise | From $120k / year | Runs inside your perimeter. Support: Availability commitment and service credits are set in the contract, against the live record on /status; no target is published until we have twelve months of it. Enterprise is quoted from $120k a year; the calculator uses that floor and a real quote may be higher. |
| Not available to buy yet | Ask | Self-serve billing, online certificate purchase, and live (non-sandbox) settlement. The allowances above are enforced today and paid tiers are provisioned by hand against a pilot or a contract; what is not built is not sold, and this row says so rather than the table implying otherwise. |
Design-partner pilots, founding certification pre-sales and paid sandbox tiers. Real money from real customers in week one.
Enterprise deployment contracts, converted from completed pilots whose reports are the business case.
Settlement fees on escrowed volume. Priced to clear custody, reconciliation and dispute handling, not to add margin per transaction and scales with adoption rather than with headcount.
Everything in the revenue model turns on how many pilots become contracts. We assume 40%. If it is 20% the business is a niche consortium protocol running one vertical; if it is 60% it is a category. The pilot instrument exists specifically to force that number up, and we would rather state it than bury it.