Licensing & tiers · Aiqbee Hive

Hive runs without a licence key on a free tier. A few capabilities are paid add-ons rather than capacity limits, and knowing which is which saves a support round-trip when a control is greyed out.

Capacity: seats and pooled allowances

Allowances are per seat and pooled, not per brain. With 3 seats on the free tier you get 15 brains and 1,500 neurons in total, spendable however you like across those brains.

State	Seats	Brains / seat	Neurons / seat
No licence key (out of the box)	2	5	500
Registered free licence	3–20	5	500
Enterprise / custom	Per agreement	Per agreement — 0 means unlimited

Registering a free licence is free and self-serve — it lifts you from 2 seats to as many as 20. Do it from Admin → Configuration.

Marketplace Library entries count too. Each brain a user adds to their Library from the Marketplace counts as 1 brain plus the listing's neurons against the pooled allowances. The published clone itself is not counted, and removing an entry or unpublishing the listing frees the capacity at once.

Paid features

These are switches that are either available or not; adding seats on the free tier does not unlock them.

Feature	What it gives you
Audit history	Append-only change history per brain, with configurable retention, queryable through `aiqbee_get_audit_history` and `aiqbee_get_brain_audit_history`. Every write is attributable to the user or service account that made it.
Advanced security	Per-neuron-type access control — grant or withhold individual neuron types from users and groups, rather than access being all-or-nothing at the brain level.
Neuron metadata	Declared metadata fields per brain, values on neurons, and `metadata_filter` on search and listings — see Neuron metadata. Only writing is gated: reading and filtering stored metadata work on any tier.

Audit and advanced security are per-brain toggles that default to off, so a paid licence does not retroactively switch anything on. Enable them per brain from the brain's page. Metadata has no toggle: a brain with no declared fields simply has nothing to write or filter.

How the gate behaves

Only enabling is gated. Turning a feature off is always allowed, so a lapsed subscription never traps a brain in a state it cannot leave.
Enforced at every entry point — the web UI, the MCP tools and the REST API all refuse equally. The greyed-out control is a courtesy; the real check is server-side.
A lapsed licence does not disable what is already on. A brain that had audit enabled keeps auditing, and keeps its history. You can still turn it off.
Metadata already written is retained, readable and filterable after a downgrade. Only new or changed values are refused; removing a value, clearing a neuron and deleting a declared field stay available.

Pairing and refresh

A licence obtained through pairing carries a JWT plus a refresh token. Hive rotates the JWT automatically — at startup and daily thereafter, refreshing once fewer than 23 days remain.

After a subscription change is made upstream, press Check License Now on Admin → Configuration rather than waiting for the daily cycle. It contacts the licence server immediately and applies the result, including any change of tier — new entitlements take effect at once, with no restart.

Air-gapped deployments can skip the licence server entirely and have a key installed directly; refresh then becomes a no-op and the key must be replaced manually before it expires.

What happens at the limits

Situation	Behaviour
Pooled brain or neuron allowance reached	Creates are refused with a message naming the cap and how to lift it. Existing data is untouched and stays readable.
Seat count reached	New user sign-ins are refused; existing users are unaffected.
Licence expired	Read-only mode — nothing is deleted, and restoring a valid licence restores writing.

Because allowances are pooled and enforced at write time, these show up as a clear error from the tool call — which is another reason to pass Hive's error text back to your model verbatim rather than replacing it.