Pricing Plans & Add-ons¶
Substrate is priced to make architectural governance accessible at every scale — from a solo developer evaluating the platform to a regulated enterprise requiring air-gapped deployment and custom model fine-tuning. The pricing model is designed so that the flat Team tier delivers the full value proposition for the MVP target segment (a single agile team of up to 15 members) at a cost that is a small fraction of the value it replaces.
Plan Comparison Table¶
| Feature | Starter | Team | Scale | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $499/month | $1,499/mo + $0.50/active node | Custom (~$30k–$120k/yr) |
| Annual Cost | $0 | $5,988/yr | $17,988/yr base + usage | Negotiated |
| Users | 3 | 15 | 75 | Unlimited |
| Repositories | 1 | 20 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| SSH-monitored Hosts | — | 10 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Teams | 1 | 1 | Up to 5 | Unlimited |
| Graph History | 7 days | 12 months | 24 months | Infinite |
| Services Enabled | Basic ingestion | All 6 Services | All 6 Services | All 6 Services |
| Institutional Memory & Simulation | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Team Isolation | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Marketplace Access | Public only | Public only | Public + Org-Private | Public + Org-Private |
| Deployment Model | Self-host | Self-host | Self-host | Air-gap / Custom LoRA |
| SLA | None | None | None | 99.9% Financial SLA |
| Support | Community forum | Email, 48h response | Email, 24h response | Dedicated CSM + Phone |
Plan Details¶
Starter — Free¶
Target: Solo developer, open-source project maintainer, or team evaluating Substrate before a purchase decision.
Starter is the bottom-up adoption mechanism. It provides enough capability to form a genuine opinion of Substrate's value without requiring a purchasing conversation. Governance is read-only — the graph is built and queries can be made, but CI/CD blocking is not active. This ensures that evaluation does not disrupt an existing development workflow.
What Starter provides: - Full graph construction from a single repository - Natural language queries against the graph via the Reasoning Service - Drift detection and visualisation (read-only — no blocking) - 7 days of graph history for temporal queries - Community marketplace access (public policy packs and connectors) - Self-hosted deployment on the user's own hardware
What Starter does not provide: - Active CI/CD blocking (governance is advisory only) - Institutional memory encoding (no WHY edges, DecisionNodes, or FailurePatterns) - Pre-change simulation - SSH runtime verification (requires at least one monitored host, available on Team+) - Multi-repository or multi-host coverage
The Starter tier creates a clear upgrade path: once a solo developer or small team has seen the value of the graph and wants to enforce policies and enable memory, the Team tier is the natural next step.
Team — $499/month ($5,988/year)¶
Target: A single agile software team of 5–15 developers. This is the primary MVP target segment.
Team is the full Substrate experience. All six services are active, CI/CD blocking is enabled, institutional memory is fully operational, and simulations can be run. The flat pricing model means the cost is predictable regardless of activity level — no surprise bills from query volume or ingestion frequency.
What Team provides: - Up to 15 users - Up to 20 repositories ingested and governed - Up to 10 SSH-monitored hosts for runtime verification - All 6 Services: Ingestion, Governance, Reasoning & Search, Proactive Maintenance, Simulation, Agent Orchestration - Full institutional memory: WHY edges, DecisionNodes, FailurePatterns, MemoryGap detection - Pre-change simulation (what-if analysis before code is written) - Active CI/CD blocking via OPA/Rego policies - Verification queues with confidence-based routing (auto-accept >90%, human review 60–90%, expert escalation <60%) - 12 months of graph history for temporal queries and drift trend analysis - Public marketplace access for community policy packs and connectors - All official Substrate policy packs (SOLID, DRY, TDD, API-first, etc.) included at no additional cost - Self-hosted deployment
The Team value anchor: At $499/month, Substrate Team costs approximately the same as two days of a senior engineer's time. It replaces tooling that would cost $50,000–$150,000/year to replicate with alternative tools and engineering labour. A single prevented architectural incident per quarter fully justifies the annual subscription cost.
Scale — $1,499/month + $0.50/active node¶
Target: A growing engineering organisation with 2–5 teams operating on a shared codebase or related systems, typically 30–75 developers.
Scale unlocks multi-team isolation, ensuring that each team's governance configuration, verification queues, and policy exceptions are sandboxed from one another. The per-node pricing model aligns revenue with the value delivered — organisations with larger infrastructure footprints derive proportionally more value from runtime verification, and the pricing reflects that.
What Scale provides (all Team features, plus): - Up to 75 users - Up to 5 isolated team environments within a single Substrate instance - Unlimited repositories and SSH-monitored hosts - Per-team policy configuration with cross-team visibility for enterprise architects - Org-Private marketplace: teams can publish internal policy packs and connectors visible only within the organisation - Audit evidence export for compliance reporting - 24 months of graph history - Slack and Datadog connector support (for ingestion and alerting) - Email support with 24-hour response SLA
Pricing mechanics: The $1,499/month base covers the infrastructure and first 20 active nodes. Each additional active SSH-monitored node costs $0.50/month. An organisation with 100 actively monitored hosts pays $1,499 + (80 × $0.50) = $1,539/month. This keeps the entry cost predictable while scaling naturally with infrastructure size.
Enterprise — Custom (~$30,000–$120,000/year)¶
Target: Regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, defence, government), large organisations with complex compliance requirements, or organisations requiring air-gapped deployment.
Enterprise is the full Substrate platform with the addition of deployment flexibility, model customisation, and contractual guarantees that security-sensitive organisations require.
What Enterprise provides (all Scale features, plus): - Unlimited users, repositories, teams, and hosts - Air-gapped deployment: Full operation with no internet connectivity. All model weights, updates, and policy packs are delivered via secure offline channels. - Custom LoRA fine-tuning: Models trained on the customer's codebase, terminology, domain language, and architectural patterns. Fine-tuned weights never leave the organisation's infrastructure. - Infinite graph history: No retention limit. Complete architectural archaeology is possible from day one of deployment. - 99.9% Financial SLA: Uptime commitment backed by service credits. - Dedicated Customer Success Manager: Named CSM with deep Substrate platform expertise. - Phone support: Direct escalation path for critical incidents. - Compliance packs: Pre-built policy packs for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and other frameworks. - Architecture Review sessions: Quarterly review sessions with Substrate architects to optimise governance configuration.
Pricing rationale: Enterprise contracts are negotiated based on organisation size, deployment complexity, and services required. The $30k–$120k range reflects the significant variation in Enterprise deployments — a 200-person regulated fintech requires a different engagement than a 2,000-person defence contractor with air-gap requirements and multiple custom LoRA training runs.
Add-On Pricing¶
Add-ons allow teams on any paid plan to expand specific capabilities beyond their plan defaults without upgrading to the next tier.
| Add-On | Price | Applicable Plans | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Extended History | +$99/month | Starter+, Team | Retain graph snapshots and drift scores beyond the plan default. Enables longer temporal queries and audit trails. |
| Custom LoRA | $5,000 one-time + $199/month | Scale, Enterprise | Model fine-tuning on the customer's codebase and terminology. Improves query quality, code understanding, and policy suggestion relevance for domain-specific language. |
| Additional Connector | $2,500 one-time | Team+ | Development and deployment of a custom ingestion connector for a niche or proprietary tool not covered by the official connector library. |
| Onboarding Package | $2,500 one-time | All paid plans | 2-day guided setup including policy seeding, connector configuration, and team training. Recommended for teams without prior OPA/Rego experience. |
| Architecture Review Session | $1,500/session | All paid plans | 2-hour session with a Substrate architect covering governance strategy, policy design review, or simulation scenario planning. |
| Host Expansion | $200/month per 50 hosts | Team | Scale SSH runtime monitoring beyond the Team plan's 10-host default in increments of 50 hosts. |
Revenue Model Context¶
Pricing Philosophy¶
Substrate's pricing is anchored to the value it replaces, not to usage metrics that create perverse incentives. A team should not be charged more because they run more queries, enforce more policies, or detect more drift. Those are success signals, not consumption events. The Team tier's flat pricing reflects this philosophy.
The per-node pricing on Scale reflects a genuine value correlation: organisations with more infrastructure derive more value from runtime verification. This is the one dimension where usage-based pricing is appropriate because it reflects real resource consumption (SSH polling, graph storage, drift computation).
Marketplace Revenue¶
The Substrate Marketplace generates a secondary revenue stream through paid community artifacts:
- Author pricing: Community contributors set their own prices in the $5–$199/month range for Policy Packs and Connector Plugins.
- Revenue share: Substrate takes a 20% share on all paid community artifacts. Authors retain 80%.
- Official artifacts: All Substrate Official policy packs and connectors are free and included in all paid plans.
- Org-Private artifacts: Artifacts published to an organisation's private marketplace generate no revenue share — these are internal knowledge assets.
Competitive Price Anchoring¶
The following comparison places Substrate's Team tier in context against the tools it replaces:
| What Substrate Replaces | Annual Cost Without Substrate | Annual Cost with Substrate Team |
|---|---|---|
| Backstage (implementation + maintenance) | $50,000–$80,000 in engineering labour | Replaced |
| LeanIX / Ardoq (EA tooling) | $30,000–$60,000/year | Replaced |
| SonarQube Enterprise (architectural rules) | $30,000/year | Partially replaced |
| Port.io (IDP scorecards) | $3,000–$15,000/year | Replaced |
| Manual architecture review overhead | $20,000–$40,000/year | Substantially reduced |
| Total replaced value | $100,000–$150,000/year | — |
| Substrate Team annual cost | — | $5,988/year |
The ROI calculation is straightforward. Substrate Team delivers $100,000–$150,000 of replaced tooling value for $5,988/year. The break-even point is reached in the first month.