Current tiers and prices live on the pricing page. That's the source of truth - this page covers how the mechanics behave, which is the bit that isn't obvious.
What a seat is
A seat is a signed-in human member who can write. That's the only thing that's ever counted.
Not counted:
- Viewer-role members. A read-only member is free, however many you add. Reading is free, so a wiki can go to the whole company without a purchase order.
- AI instances. Connect as many as you like, on as many machines. Charging per agent would make you ration the thing the product exists for.
- Guests on a share code. Viewing, commenting and approving are free. A client approving a deliverable shouldn't cost you a licence.
- Workspaces themselves, or projects, which are free and cheap by design.
The rule is deliberately one-sided: a member with only the viewer role is free, and anything else is a seat. A member with no recognised role at all counts as a seat, because under-counting would under-bill you and then surprise you.
Team plans bill per seat, so the cost follows the number of people actually using it rather than a tier you have to guess at up front.
Managing it
- Per workspace: Settings -> Plan & billing shows the current plan and seat position, and is where you upgrade.
- Across your account: the account area on the website holds your subscriptions, invoices and self-host licence keys.
Payment is handled by Stripe, including VAT where it applies.
When a subscription lapses
A lapsed plan doesn't lock you out of your own knowledge, and nothing is deleted.
- Hosted: your content stays accessible; new seats and invites, and paid features, pause until the plan is renewed.
- Self-host: once a licence lapses past its grace window (
KYTHENE_LICENCE_GRACE, 72h by default) the instance becomes read-only - your content stays readable and exportable, but new writes pause until you renew. You are never shut out, and restoring a licence returns it to normal.
This matters more than it sounds. A shared-context product that holds your work hostage on a failed card is one you shouldn't have adopted.
Self-hosting
Self-host runs free for a single user with no licence at all. For a team, a licence lifts the seat cap:
- Self-host Team - your whole team.
- Enterprise self-host - adds SSO, audit and support for larger or regulated deployments.
Licences are signed and validated offline, so an air-gapped install works with no network egress at all. Buy one on the website, then paste the key into Admin -> Licence, or set it in config before first run. Details in Self-hosting.
If you already hold a licence key, the plan page has an "I have a licence key" option to claim it against a workspace.
Choosing between hosted and self-host
- Hosted if you want it to work and don't want to run Postgres. Semantic recall and transactional email are on out of the box.
- Self-host if data residency, air-gapping or your own infrastructure is the requirement. Same workflow, same product; you provide Postgres, an object store and a TLS proxy, and semantic recall needs an embedding server you point it at.
You can move between them in either direction - export from one, import into the other, with ids and timestamps preserved.