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

21,000sats

one-time, perpetual

Up to 5 products
Up to 5 policies per product
Up to 5 active discount codes
BTCPay payments (Bitcoin / Lightning)
One-time purchases
Self-host on Start9 (always)
Distributed via free codes — ask

Get Creator

Pro

250,000sats

per year

Unlimited products / policies / codes
Recurring subscriptions (when shipped, v0.3)
Zaprite payments — accept BTC + cards (when shipped, v0.3)
Multi-operator admin (when shipped)
Everything in Creator

Upgrade to Pro

Patron

500,000sats

per year

Same features as Pro
"Patron" badge in your admin UI
Funds Keysat development
Honest upsell — no fake feature gate

Become a Patron

Note on what's gated. Today the only enforced gates are the capacity caps — number of products, policies, and active discount codes. Pro will gate the new payment-provider features (recurring billing, Zaprite card payments) when those ship in v0.3. Patron is functionally identical to Pro — its tier exists for operators who want to fund development beyond what Pro needs to stay in the green.

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 (5/5/5). The license exists primarily so operators get a real "I bought it" experience and so we can offer the upgrade path to Pro. Hobbyists can run Keysat indefinitely without paying us a sat.