Project · Pricing

Pricing.

Keysat dogfoods its own licensing. The Keysat daemon is itself licensed by a Keysat instance running at licensing.keysat.xyz. The same primitive operators use to gate features in their own software gates a few Keysat features behind paid tiers. The free tier is genuinely useful: most hobbyist operators will never need to upgrade.

The three tiers

Creator

Freeforever

no payment required

Up to 5 products
Up to 5 policies per product
Up to 10 active discount codes
BTCPay payments (Bitcoin / Lightning)
All four SDKs · full wire format
Webhooks, audit log, recovery, analytics opt-in
Self-host on Start9 (always)

Get Creator

Pro

100,000sats

per year (recurring)

Unlimited products / policies / codes
Recurring subscriptions: trials, grace, auto-renew
Zaprite payments (expanded payment options including card payment capabilities)
In-place tier upgrades (proration handled)
Everything in Creator

Upgrade to Pro

Patron

250,000sats

one-time, perpetual

Everything in Pro
Perpetual license: one-time, never renews
Direct one-on-one support
"Patron" badge in your admin UI
Listed on the Patrons page at keysat.xyz
Early access to release-candidate builds

Become a Patron

Prices shown are a snapshot. The canonical source is the live tier cards at keysat.xyz (rendered dynamically from the master Keysat instance) and licensing.keysat.xyz/buy/keysat. Launch-special discounts (when active) show on those pages with a "LAUNCH SPECIAL" ribbon and the discount auto-applied; they're not represented here.

What's gated. Capacity caps (products / policies-per-product / active discount codes) are enforced at create-time on the Creator tier. Pro unlocks the recurring_billing entitlement (auto-renewing subscriptions) and the zaprite_payments entitlement (expanded payment options including card payment capabilities). Patron differs from Pro in that it is a perpetual license (never expires or renews), plus direct one-on-one support. It's not a feature gate, it's a different ownership model.

What the caps count

All caps fire at create-time only. Once you're under the cap, you're never retroactively kicked off. A Creator-tier operator who currently has 5 products keeps all 5 if you ever lower the caps in the future. The cap just stops them from creating a 6th.

Products: counts every product row in the database. Free up a slot by deleting products you no longer offer (the admin UI exposes delete; there's no "soft-disable" affordance for products).
Policies per product: counts policies on a single product, regardless of public/active state.
Active discount codes: counts only active=true codes. Disable old codes to free up slots without deleting them. Disabled codes don't function but stay in the audit trail.

Switching tiers

Buy a higher-tier license at licensing.keysat.xyz/buy/keysat, then activate it via StartOS → Keysat → Actions → Activate Keysat license. The daemon picks up the new entitlements on next request. No restart needed. The persistent banner in your admin sidebar always shows your current tier and the next-tier CTA.

Downgrading: drop your license file (or replace with a lower tier). Existing rows stay; new ones are subject to the new caps. No data loss.

Running unlicensed

Keysat works without any license at all. You'll see "Unlicensed" in the sidebar and get the same caps as a Creator-tier operator (5 products / 5 policies per product / 10 active discount codes). The Creator tier is free either way; the self-license flow exists primarily so operators get a real "I bought it" experience for the paid tiers and so we can offer the upgrade path to Pro. Hobbyists can run Keysat indefinitely without paying us a sat.