Files
vantage/docs/superpowers/specs
mrhid6andClaude Opus 5 d15ab78bd5 docs: spec 6 revised for account membership
An account has people, and those people belong to several cloud
instances. That requires dropping the global unique index on users.email
for a compound (instance_id, email), scoping the two unscoped lookups
that made the global index load-bearing, and projecting HQ users into
instances as real control-plane users.

Self-hosted instances are never projected into; their users stay local.

Restructured into three phases: identity, creation and lifecycle,
membership.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-26 12:16:38 +01:00
..

Vantage Licensing Programme — Spec Index

Build in this order. Specs 0a5 were designed 2026-07-24; spec 6 on 2026-07-26.

# Spec Plan Status
0a shared-module plan shipped
0b instance-rename plan shipped, migration verified on live
1 licensing-core plan shipped
2 instance-licensing plan shipped, no grandfathering — existing cloud instances are read-only until admin backfills
3 admin-backend plan shipped, verified end to end against scratch databases
4 admin-site ready to start
5 paddle-billing ready to start; its "signup migration off sitesvc" section is superseded by 6
6 cloud-instance-creation ready to start

Specs 1 and 2 together give working licensing with licences cut by hand with lkctl — no admin service needed. 4 and 5 can run in parallel once 3 lands.

4 and 5 can run in parallel once 3 lands.

The shape

Account (admin only)
 ├── Instance 1  cloud        vantage.hostxtra.co.uk/<slug>   licence auto-injected
 ├── Instance 2  cloud                                        licence auto-injected
 └── Instance 3  self-hosted  customer's own deployment       licence pasted by hand

The control plane knows only Instance. Accounts exist solely in the admin service, because a self-hosted instance has no row in the cloud database at all.

Decisions that everything else follows from

Licences are offline-verified signed blobs. ECDSA P-384 with SHA-256 via github.com/hyperboloide/lk, public key compiled into the server, no phone-home anywhere. This buys air-gapped self-hosting and means no Vantage instance ever depends on the licensing service being up. It costs revocation: a licence is valid until it expires whatever Paddle later says. Self Hosted is annual-only to bound that window.

Every licence is bound to one instance UUID. Self-hosted customers link their UUID before the licence is signed, so there is no unbound licence and no claim protocol.

Expiry degrades, it does not break. Monitors keep executing, alerts keep firing, agents keep their keys, in-flight workflow runs finish. Mutations stop. Deletes and OS-update application stay open so a customer is never trapped over-limit or unpatched.

Tiers are data, not code. The server reads Limits and Features and never branches on tier name. Tier contents live in the admin plans table and are snapshotted into each issued licence, so editing a plan never rewrites history — the same rule as workflow_runs.steps_snapshot.

Free Professional Self Hosted
deployment cloud only cloud self-hosted
max servers 3 unlimited unlimited
max secret groups 1 unlimited unlimited
max channels 1 unlimited unlimited
console no yes yes
OIDC no yes yes
term monthly, £0 monthly or annual annual only

Free is cloud-only by construction: it is only ever signed with deployment: "cloud", and verification rejects a deployment mismatch. There is no server-side flag to edit. One Free instance per account.

Existing cloud tenants are not grandfathered. The migration that would have done it was removed before plan 2 shipped, so every existing cloud instance is read-only until it is licensed by hand through the admin service: attach it to an account with POST /api/staff/instances, then POST /api/staff/instances/:id/issue. That flow is verified in plan 3, so it works today via the API and is the first job the admin UI is used for.