What Per-Node Pricing Means, and Why We Don't Count People

Most SaaS pricing counts seats. ModelBrain's paid tiers count nodes, machines with their own cryptographic identity, because the free product has no login for a seat count to attach to in the first place.

There's no login to count

ModelBrain's core has no user-login concept. An account only ever gets created for a node that subscribes to something that genuinely needs to live server-side, such as paid networking or managed backup. A purely local install never creates one, so “per seat” has nothing to attach to even if we wanted it.

A node doesn't exist until it needs to

A node's identity is a cryptographic keypair, and it isn't generated at install time. It's generated the first time that machine subscribes to paid networking. Before that point, a purely local install is secured entirely by OS file permissions and kernel peer-credential checks, with nothing resembling a peer list or an identity to lose. That also means a reinstall before ever going paid is a complete non-event, since there was never an identity there to begin with.

Why per-node instead of per-person

One person with a laptop and a desktop is two nodes and one person. A five-person team sharing one heavily-used machine is one node and five people. Billing the thing that actually consumes coordination resources, the machine with a peer identity, lines the price up with what the paid tier actually does: let machines reach each other, not “authenticate a person.”

The actual numbers

$6/node/month billed annually, $8 monthly, with a volume break to $4/node past the 25th node on one account. That's the same rate whether the node is syncing your own two machines or joining a team's shared memory. Full breakdown on the pricing page.