business
Pricing & Phases
How the product makes money at each stage of growth.
Phase 1 — Local-first freemium
| Tier | What you get | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Solo | One Node, one user, multi-device | Free |
| Team (early) | Up to 3 Nodes across users (when Phase 2 ships) | Free |
| Beyond | Per-seat license once team exceeds 3 active Nodes | $29 / user / month |
This mirrors how Perforce got its initial commercial traction — free for small teams, priced when teams scale.
Phase 2 — Infrastructure as a service
When teams adopt the Preview & CI layer:
- Build minutes, similar to GitHub Actions / Vercel
- Hosted preview bandwidth
- Telemetry retention beyond a free tier
This is the layer that makes the unit economics work even as the per-user license stays low. We host real artifacts; we charge for the infrastructure that does it.
Phase 3 — Enterprise governance + own AI
Two new revenue streams stack on top:
- Enterprise governance — SSO, audit logs, on-prem relay, advanced role management. Priced per organization, not per seat.
- Manifoldone AI subscription — open-source model (likely DeepSeek or Llama-derived) tuned and hosted by us. A single subscription per project replaces N individual Claude subscriptions.
The AI subscription is also how Phase 2’s CC license issue gets solved structurally: teams that opt in stop running into per-user license boundaries because the model is ours.
What we deliberately don’t charge for
- The Node itself (it runs on the user’s machine).
- Memory storage at small volumes — recaps and small text artifacts cost us very little.
- Read-only viewers (a teammate who just wants to watch shouldn’t be a billable seat).
- Recap LLM tokens. The summary at the end of every Thread is generated through a Manifoldone-managed gateway and absorbed into the subscription. The user never burns their own Claude allowance on the summary.