Core and direct use are free
The engine, direct Cells, installers, schedulers, and public Cell image ship free for everyone. A managed Host right is separate and never makes the free path a trial.
Our promise
What you pay for, and what you never lose.
Relay Core and direct use are free for everyone. Premium Packs sell maintained content. Relay Host covers managed customer operations. Anything that ships free stays free. This page is the standing promise we hold every product to.
The short version
Core and direct use stay free. Packs and managed Host rights are separate. Nothing free becomes paid.
You pay for content
A paid pack is maintained content that uses those free capabilities: ready-made agents, blueprints, and setups we keep current for you. You are buying the upkeep, not the ability to run it.
Nothing regresses
Anything that ever shipped free stays free. We do not move a working, free capability behind a paywall later. What you can do today, you can always do.
Buyer-based gating, not feature-based
Most software decides what you can do by which plan you are on. We decide it by whether you bought a specific pack. That is the whole gate: one thing you own, checked once, and then the pack is yours.
There is no tier that turns the free engine into a working product. Direct use is complete and free. A Pack license adds maintained content. A Relay Host license separately covers managed customer Cells. Neither takes the free path away.
Never-regress: free stays free
This is the promise we hold ourselves to the hardest. If a capability ever shipped to everyone for free, it does not later become paid. We will not take something you rely on and put a price on it.
Here is a real example. While building the first paid pack, the Agency pack, we found the engine was missing two things: packs could not add their own triggers, and blueprints could not be scheduled. We shipped both of those free, for every user, in the very same release that put the paid pack on sale. The capability went to everyone. The pack is what you buy.
What a license actually gates
A Pack license unlocks the premium packs you own and keeps them current. A Relay Host license proves the separate right to run managed customer Cells within its signed capacity. Neither switches on Relay Core or direct Cells, and the public Cell image needs no license token.
Your packs are yours forever. If a license lapses, everything you installed keeps working exactly as it did. Renewal is only about getting the year’s new and updated packs and priority support, never about keeping what you already own.
If a Host term ends, Cells already running keep running and export and recovery remain available. New managed capacity, forward paid updates and re-download stop. Compatible critical-security fixes remain included.
What we will never do
So the promise is concrete, here are the things we have decided against, on purpose:
- No database licensing. Your right to use what you own is not a row we can flip off.
- No upsell banners in the command-line tool. The software you run does not nag you to buy.
- No online re-validation. The license is checked offline; your software never sends your data to Orionfold, and it never has to check in with us to keep working.
- No expiry that disables installed packs. When a term ends, your installed packs keep running.
This promise runs across the whole line. See it in practice on Relay, where the engine is free and open and a license only adds the premium packs you own.