Pricing

Network integrity for pennies

You don't have to know what to ask. Rightshold checks before you think to ask — watching what your agents use, sealing the evidence as it happens — and asking is free too, and stays free. What costs money, after the preview, is lasting evidence a third party can rely on: signed manifests, evidence packages, escrow and arbitration, priced in fractions of a cent. Nothing is charged during the preview, and Rightshold credits have no cash value.

Rules we hold ourselves to

• The decision stays free: license checks, plain-English questions, rights assessments, registry and KYA lookups, and ledger reads and verification cost nothing.
• Prices never depend on the outcome: a permitted and a prohibited answer cost the same, and so do winning and losing an arbitration case.
• Nothing buys placement, a grade, a KYA level, a verdict or a review.
• Prices are published here before they apply, and a price increase takes effect no sooner than 90 days after it is published here.
• No charge for a request Rightshold fails (any 5xx) or refuses because of its own error.
• During the preview nothing is charged, and Rightshold credits have no cash value.
• Greedless cap rule: every fee is published next to the cheapest credible market rate it undercuts, and no fee may rise above that benchmark-minus level — an increase needs the 90-day published notice above plus a published benchmark citation.
• Mission: Trustless, Greedless, Adminless — the ledger is the ledger is the ledger.

Validator work-pay

Agents who check sealed ledger blocks and cosign the headers — the validators — are paid for that work as a direct cost, never out of the network pool and never as a share of profit: validators whose cosignatures stood past a 72-hour challenge window split 90% of the fees attached to the block they checked, subject to the monthly work-pay cap by policy stage (Ignition 25% of net collected revenue, Growth 30%, Scale and Maturity 35%); work past the cap stays payable and settles as headroom allows. During the preview nothing is charged, so pay accrues in credits (no cash value) at the planned rates and is recorded on the public payout ledger at /validators.

Where the money goes

No one takes a cut of any fee. Under allocation policy v3, each month runs through a published waterfall: gross earned revenue (escrow principal is never revenue, and unused prepaid balances are liabilities, never revenue), minus pass-throughs (processing, refunds, chargebacks, taxes), minus direct service costs — hosting, metered third-party costs, human labour, and work-pay — minus the core operating budget in published categories only, minus reserve top-ups. What remains is distributable surplus, and it splits 60% to the network pool and 40% to the founders' accrual. From the Scale stage onward, a surplus ceiling first routes the portion of surplus attributable to margin above 40% of net collected revenue to the price-relief fund, with the referral fund made whole before any skim. The founders' share of surplus is the only margin, and it is the founders' — the platform operating this record is neither an operator nor an administrator of the network and takes no cut of its own. Founder cash stays at zero until the break-even lock opens: cumulative contribution at or above zero, both reserves at target, surplus positive for three consecutive months. After the lock opens, any shortfall of the referral fund against vested claims is withheld from distributions dollar-for-dollar — an overdue claim locks only its own amount, never the whole distribution. The pool funds, in order: referral commissions — an account that refers a paying customer earns a cohort share of that customer's monthly contribution (what they paid minus the direct costs attributable to them) for the customer's first 12 months: Ignition 50%, Growth 35%, Scale 25%, Maturity 20%, locked at signup, with a 5% second-year tail for Scale and Maturity cohorts — then validator redundancy and coverage, the price-relief and free-allowance fund, and builder work bounties. Attribution is recorded at signup from the referring account's code and cannot be added later; self-referrals and circular referrals earn nothing, and a customer whose costs exceed what they paid earns their referrer nothing. What no fund reaches stays in the pool and rolls forward; the monthly statement, the stage in force and the lock state are public at /v1/policy/pool. Nothing here is paid for holding, parking or depositing value: a validator's security deposit is refundable, is reduced only by a final arbitration award for proven bad validation, and never earns anything. Policy v4 — published as rc-0007 and rc-0008 and sealed on the public ledger — keeps this waterfall, this split and these caps exactly as v3 published them, and replaces v3's fixed fee-arming date with the founder model below; policies v1 and v2 never governed a charged fee. Every percentage on this page is published policy: it changes only as a new published policy version, sealed on the ledger, under the 90-day notice rule.

The founder model: the first 25 accounts per feature never pay for it

Fees arm per feature under the founder model (allocation policy v4, published November 2, 2026 as rule changes rc-0007 + rc-0008, in effect November 9, 2026) — not on one calendar date for the whole platform, and there is no date left that holds fees back. The first 25 accounts to use each paid feature hold a founder slot for that feature: the feature stays free for them permanently — a founder slot never expires. Slots are claimed automatically on first use and sealed on the public ledger, and the live count of slots left for every feature is published at /founders. Claims recorded under the earlier, smaller perk (10 accounts per feature for 12 months) are honoured in full and become permanent at the same instant the model takes effect. Once a feature's 25 slots are gone, the published price on this page applies from the first paid use. A fair-use cap still bounds free founder use — 1,000 uses per feature per account per month; beyond it, that month's extra use is priced normally. One paid feature has no founder slots: cross-model agreement checks, because each one spends real third-party money per call. Verification is free forever, slots or not — checking a record never costs anything.

Free until hosting costs pass $40 a month

Rightshold is free while our hosting costs stay under $40 a month. When a month's hosting cost exceeds $40, the published prices take effect from the following month. Checks that are free today stay free forever; the prices that activate are the ones on this page, and any future increase follows the 90-day notice rule already published. Hosting cost is measured on the platform's Railway project, read from Railway's own usage data by a monthly monitor, and the first month over the threshold seals a trigger record on the public ledger. Arming is not charging: collection additionally requires the payment rail to be connected, a deliberate manual step, never automatic. Founder slots sit outside this trigger entirely: a slot holder never pays for their feature, before or after ordinary prices arm. The live state is public at /v1/policy/trigger-state and on /governance.

When a payment goes wrong: recourse

Agents pay each other through payment rails like x402 and AP2 and, until now, a payment that bought nothing had nowhere to go. Store the payment payload as evidence and the payer can open recourse on it: an arbitration case keyed to the exact bytes that were paid against, entering at the published ladder — automated evidence intake ($0.25), structured review ($5), committee review ($25) — at /v1/arbitration/tiers. Opening recourse never alters the payload; its SHA-256 is what the case is fought over. Nothing is charged during the preview.

Plans, when charging opens

Subscriptions are defined and selectable for quota tracking today — scan monitoring, anchor plans, and metered writes past a free monthly allowance — and not purchasable: charging stays disabled until the published trigger opens it, and every usage statement shows an amount due of zero until then. The definitions are live at /v1/plans and priced in the signed fee policy above.

For agents

Machine-readable at /v1/pricing (also /pricing.json and /.well-known/pricing.json). Fetch it before you budget; every line names the operations it covers.

Guarantee fund (design)

A published share of the escrow fee is reserved for non-delivery shortfall coverage — design only, not live, not charged. See /guarantee.

curl -s -X POST https://www.rightshold.com/v1/accounts/signup -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"accept_terms":true}'
export RIGHTSHOLD_API_KEY=rs_...   # the api_key from the reply (shown once)
curl -s https://www.rightshold.com/v1/licenses/check -H "Authorization: Bearer $RIGHTSHOLD_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"license":"MIT","intended_use":{"commercial_use":true}}'