Operations

Plans and entitlements#

ClawMetry is open core. The dashboard, the store, the CLI and the whole observation path are free and always will be. What a paid plan adds is breadth — more runtimes, more nodes, more channels, longer retention — and the governance and analysis features built on top.

This page is the reference for what is in which tier and how the answer is computed. To ask the question about your install, use the entitlement commands.

The tiers#

They are ranked in exactly that order. tier_rank() is what every "is this enough?" and "what is the next tier?" question resolves against; Trial ranks between Free and Starter, which is why a trial reaches paid runtimes but not every Pro feature.

The five axes#

An entitlement is not one number. Five independent axes are checked separately, and a plan can be sufficient on four and short on the fifth.

Capacity#

Channels and nodes are capacity-scoped, not catalogue-scoped: every one of the chat adapters is free code, and what a tier bounds is how many you run at once. That is why clawmetry channels --why takes a count rather than an adapter name.

CLAWMETRY_RETENTION_DAYS can shorten the window but never lengthen it past the tier cap. clawmetry retention --json shows both the cap and the effective value.

Runtimes#

3 of the 30 supported runtimes are free at every tier:

The other 27 — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Aider, Cline, OpenHands, Devin and the rest — unlock at Trial and above. There is no partial runtime ladder: every paid tier gets the whole set. See Runtime support for what each one exposes.

Features#

Free at every tier, including OSS with no account:

Added at Starter:

Added at Pro:

Added at Enterprise:

How the tier is resolved#

Three sources, checked in order. The first one that answers wins:

1. A local license file — ~/.clawmetry/license.key. This is what

self-hosted Pro, Enterprise and air-gapped installs use.

1. The cloud plan cache — ~/.clawmetry/cloud_plan.json, written by the

daemon from the heartbeat. This is how a hosted plan reaches the dashboard process, which does its own entitlement resolution and never talks to the billing system directly.

1. OSS free — the fallback, and also what any failure resolves to. A broken

license file or an unreachable cloud never escalates privileges and never crashes the app; it degrades to free.

The result is cached for 60 seconds. That is why a plan change can take up to a minute to show in the UI, and why clawmetry diagnose prints the cache age.

clawmetry diagnose        # which source answered, cache age, enforcement state

The diagnostic reports the license path and whether a file is there, the cloud plan path and size, the enforcement env var, the cache age and TTL, whether the next call will hit the cache, and the retention override — enough to tell "no license" apart from "license present but not being read".

Grace mode#

Grace is on by default. While grace is true, every check answers allowed regardless of the resolved tier: allows_feature, allows_runtime and allows_node_count all short-circuit to true.

clawmetry tier --json | jq '{tier, grace, enforced}'

This is deliberate — the paywall is announced before it bites, and a node that is quietly ingesting a paid runtime today under grace should not stop dead on an upgrade. It is also the answer to "why is this runtime marked locked in the UI but still showing sessions?"

CLAWMETRY_ENFORCE_AT is what the *_at variants of every entitlement query resolve against, so you can ask "what will be locked when enforcement starts?" before it does.

Expiry#

A trial or a term license carries an expiry. After it passes:

• Paid features stop being allowed. Free features are unaffected.
• Paid runtimes stop being allowed. The free runtimes keep ingesting.
• The node limit collapses to 1.

Nothing is deleted and the daemon keeps running. An expired install is a free install, not a broken one. A user who lets a trial lapse can also opt into free-only mode, which the dashboard surfaces as an explicit banner rather than a silently narrower product.

Where the answer is enforced#

The entitlement is one verdict read from many places, never re-derived:

That last row is the one asymmetry worth knowing: everywhere else a failure degrades to free and keeps working, but a control path that could signal a real process refuses rather than guesses.

Choosing a tier#

clawmetry bundle \
  --runtimes claude_code,cursor,codex \
  --features anomaly_detection,cost_optimizer \
  --channels 6 --retention-days 90 --nodes 4

This answers the actual purchasing question — the cheapest tier that covers everything you named, across all five axes at once — instead of making you read five tables and take the maximum yourself.

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