Licensing
A licence covers the house as a machine. Whoever is in the house is in the house: there are no seats, no per-user fees, no per-call fees. A house with one person and one agent costs the same as the same house with ten people and fifty agents.
What you choose
| Axis | Choices | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Size | economy, premium, on-premise | the machine and the local computation it carries; see sizes-and-volumes |
| Data volume | additional volumes attached to a VM house | how much the house can hold |
The doors (reader, author, modeller) are not tiers. Every house has all three, and a licence covers all three.
What is metered and what is not
- Not metered: calls, skills used, number of agents, number of people, number of keys.
- Metered, optional and planned: a model service operated by core.blue, at the
provider's token price plus a service fee. If you attach your own model or your own API key,
core.blue meters nothing. See
plugging-in-a-model.
When a licence expires
The house becomes read-only. The reader door keeps working; writes are refused with a message that says why. Nothing is deleted, nothing is locked away, export keeps working. A licence cannot be revoked; one that should end early is replaced by one with a shorter period.
The licence file
A house on a core.blue VM is licensed by its subscription. A house on your own hardware
carries a small signed JSON document, conventionally license.json:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
format | format version, 1 |
house | the house id, stable even if the house moves |
licensee | who holds the licence |
issuedOn, validUntil | the period, both days inclusive |
edition | economy, premium or on-premise |
issuer | core.blue |
The signature is ECDSA over P-256 with SHA-256, over a canonical form of these seven
fields. The house verifies it with core.blue's public key and never has to call home,
which is what makes on-premise possible in networks without internet access. Renewing
means placing a new file. The licence does not limit how much data an on-premise house
holds.
The format is specified so that it can be verified independently: a written specification and a set of test vectors exist, and a reader written from the specification alone, in another language, gives the same verdicts as core.blue's own. Reading the licence inside a house is planned; the house does not check one yet.
Prices
Call pricing: it returns the offer as data. A licence costs what the house costs; there
is no separate price for the licence file. The price of on-premise is not yet decided.
The terms are part of the same data: no minimum term, and a subscription ends with the
month that is paid.