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>
Vantage Licensing Programme — Spec Index
Build in this order. Specs 0a–5 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| 5 | paddle-billing | — | ready to start; its "signup migration off sitesvc" section is superseded by 6 |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.