The free edition is the whole kernel at full strength for one developer on any number of projects and machines. The commercial line is a second person, or somebody else's data. Never a second machine.
Which means the line is drawn on people. One developer running a hive and a relay on their own hardware, with a laptop, a desktop and a build box all on one brain, is the free edition and stays that way. What you pay for is the second person, or us running it for you.
| 1 person | $9.99/mo, yearly |
| up to 20 people | $99/mo |
| up to 50 people | $199/mo |
| up to 200 people | $499/mo |
Hive is priced per company rather than per seat, on purpose: $119.88 a year for one person, then $99 a month up to twenty people, $199 up to fifty and $499 up to two hundred. Adding a person should never be a decision anybody has to think about, because the second person is the only reason to pay and friction there taxes the only growth there is. Storing more and recalling more never costs more either: the whole thesis is recall before you search and write before the session ends and a meter teaches customers to stop doing both. Fair-use caps notify; they do not charge.
| Mind | Hive | Appliance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | 1 person: $9.99/mo billed yearly to 20 people: $99/mo to 50: $199/mo to 200: $499/mo | Quoted |
| Projects | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
| Machines | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
| Ranking, decay, supersession, provenance, guards | full | full | full |
| MCP, every command as a tool | yes | yes | yes |
| Session hooks and auto-recall | yes | yes | yes |
| Full export, no lock-in | yes | yes | yes |
| Reaching one brain from several machines | yes, you run it | yes | yes |
| Writes survive the server being unreachable | n/a, it is local | queued, in order | queued, in order |
| People per brain | 1 | up to 200 | unlimited |
| Roles, attribution, org axioms | no | yes | yes |
| Encryption at rest | no, deliberately | per-org key | per-org key, your master key |
| Who holds the key | you | us, in Vault | you |
| Web UI | in the binary: read, tree, forget | the binary's own, plus a hosted dashboard for people, approvals, credentials, billing, export | the same, on your own server |
| Retention, legal hold, erasure | no | yes | yes |
| Standard DPA | n/a | included | yours if you prefer |
| SSO through your identity provider | n/a | not built | not built |
| Who runs the server and the backups | you | us | you |
The DPA is included at the cheapest paid tier rather than held back. Under GDPR it is table stakes for anyone with EU customers and a paid tier you cannot legally buy from Ireland is not a tier.
Ranking, decay tiers, supersession, provenance, the guards, local MCP and full export ship in Mind at full strength. Not a trial of them. Not a subset. A price multiple should buy a different thing, not the same thing with permissions.
Encryption at rest is missing from Mind on purpose rather than as a hook. One developer self-hosting their own data has no second party to be protected from and a key hierarchy nobody needs is an excellent way to lose a brain permanently. Full-disk encryption on your laptop is the right layer for that job. The moment somebody else's reasoning is in the store, the argument changes and that is where the paid key hierarchy starts.
Export is complete and free in both directions. ns-brain export gives you every memory, event, supersession link and provenance field as one JSON file and import reads it back, remapping the ids that do not survive a round trip. Nothing about paying makes your data harder to take somewhere else.
Start free, self-host until the day the constraint is real and move when it is. That is the intended path rather than a fallback.
It is the whole product for one developer and it stays free whatever happens to the rest of this.