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.

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 — accept BTC + cards (shipping in v0.3)
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 will unlock zaprite_payments (card payments via Zaprite) when that lands in v0.3. Patron differs from Pro by being a one-time perpetual license rather than an annual subscription, plus direct one-on-one support — not a feature gate, 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 (active + inactive). Operators don't get to evade the cap by toggling old rows inactive.
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.