Pricing#

What the plans are for#

Homelab and Lab are for your own network — home, lab, learning, evaluation. Running a business's production network on them, or a client's, is outside their terms; that is Business. The restriction is a term of the licence agreement, not something the key checks.

Business is sold per ten routers. Buy two units for twenty; the key that arrives carries the total. There is no unlimited plan, and no plan is per-seat: the unit is the router, because the unit the router enforces is the router.

Yearly billing is ten months' price — $90, $190 and $790 a year. No other discount exists.

No plan includes support#

Support is not part of any plan and is not sold separately. What every subscriber has is the documentation, versioned with the code, and — once an address is published — a mailbox read on a best-effort basis with no response time attached. Support says exactly that, and says what to collect before writing in.

How the image reaches you#

Your key opens the release host. Paste it at releases.rhymelikedi.me/download in a browser and every release directory opens for twelve hours; from a shell it is the password, curl -u licence:<key>; on a router it goes in the image URL. The host answers 401 to anyone without one, and the channel index — versions and checksums — is the only public file. There is no free plan; the agent package sits behind the same key, so a licensed router can update it in place. How to get the image has the commands.

What happens when a subscription lapses#

Not a brick. A router whose key has expired:

• signs you in, with your accounts, TOTP and single sign-on working as normal;
• shows every page, every counter, every log line, the whole configuration tree and the whole audit trail — except two fleet reads, named below;
• serves /metrics;
• refuses to stage, commit, roll back, install apps or reconcile, answering 402 with a plain sentence and a link to the Licence page.

A card that expires costs you the ability to change the router, not the ability to see it.

Exactly what the gate covers#

One check, wrapped around a specific list of routes. Behind the gate: POST /api/stage, /api/stage/remove, /api/commit, /api/commit/confirm, /api/discard, /api/configure, /api/rollback, /api/config/save, /api/config/load, /api/reconcile, /api/capture, and the app-store actions (plan, pull, prepare, update, restart, feature, and deleting an image).

Not behind the gate: sign-in and everything under /api/auth/, the audit log, /metrics, wheelhouse-agent plan, and every read except two.

One feature name is checked anywhere in the agent, and it is fleet. It is in the Lab and Business keys and not in Homelab's. Single sign-on, the four roles and the attributed audit log are not gated: they work on every plan, and on a lapsed router. On Business they are what the commercial licence covers, not what it switches on.

What a key is, and what it does on the network#

A key is a signed statement of the plan, the feature list, the router limit, the expiry and the grace period. The agent verifies it offline against a public key compiled into its binary, so a router with no route to the internet still knows what it holds.

While the licence server is reachable the agent refreshes once a day and receives a token whose expiry follows the subscription. A router that stays offline keeps working until that expiry plus the grace period the key itself carries — seven days on the plans the server issues today, read out of the signed statement rather than hardcoded in the agent — and the interface warns during the grace window with the date changes will stop.

The refresh is one request every 24 hours carrying four fields: the key, a fingerprint of the installation, the host name and the agent version. Nothing else ever leaves the router. It can be turned off with one flag, and the trade is spelled out on the privacy page.

If the router's clock reads earlier than the licence was issued, the agent stays open and says why rather than closing the write plane. A forward jump from a broken NTP peer would otherwise lock set service ntp behind the fault it caused.

What you would be buying, and what you would not#

• The gate is commercial, not a security boundary. The check runs in a binary on a router you hold. The aim is that paying is easier than patching.
• The GPL boundary is unchanged. The licence covers Wheelhouse's code — the agent and the interface — not the operating system underneath, which is GPL and whose corresponding source ships with every release.
• The router limit counts installations that have activated the key, keyed on a fingerprint derived from /etc/machine-id. Freeing a retired router's activation is not self-service: nothing on the router releases it, the Licence page has no such action, and today it is a request to whoever issued the key. Rebuilding onto new hardware spends a seat until that request is answered.
• Billing is Stripe's: Checkout to buy, webhooks to issue and renew, the customer portal to cancel. The licence server never sees a card. Checkout opens when the licence agreement exists; the mechanism is built and waiting on the paperwork.

Before you buy Lab or Business for a fleet#

Read on#

• Support — what a plan does and does not include, and what does not exist yet.
• Privacy — the whole of what the router sends.
• The wiki: licensing and what a router without a valid key does.