> How a Hadal licence is shaped: seat bands, multi-entity group cover, a term ladder priced in months paid per year, and the register of closed doors. - Canonical: https://hadalinstruments.com/licensing/ --- Commercial architecture # How a Hadal licence is shaped Price is a function of three things: how many **seats**, how many **entities**, and how long a **term**. One of those is published and automatic. Two of them are negotiated, and this page says exactly why. It also publishes the doors we have closed, and what would open each one. Most of that list costs us money to hold — which is the only reason it is worth reading. - **Axes** — 03 - **Doors open** — 12 - **Doors closed** — 11 - **Register** — v1.2 Pre-launch. Nothing on this site is purchasable and every figure below is **anticipated** — indicative terms awaiting my ratification, never final, confirmed or current. ## Seats, entities, term Software has no marginal cost worth discussing. Support does. One person can onboard a fixed number of desks in a quarter, answer a fixed number of escalations in a week, and hold a fixed number of conventions in their head at once. **Support capacity is the binding constraint on this business**, and it is the thing the three axes are actually measuring. ### Seats Published · automatic Applies to three instruments and no others. The band is read off a printed ladder and applied without asking, because a discount you have to ask for is a discount for whoever asks loudest. ### Entities Negotiated The support surface scales with entities, not with seats. Two affiliated desks are two onboardings and two escalation paths whether they hold four seats or forty, so a group licence is scoped rather than looked up. ### Term Negotiated within a published ladder Commissioning cost is front-loaded. A longer term amortises a real cost across more months of service, and the ladder below is our share of that saving handed back — arithmetic, not a sale. **Being explicit about this is not modesty.** A vendor who cannot tell you what limits their pricing is either not constrained by anything, in which case the number is arbitrary, or is constrained by something they would rather you did not know. ## Seat bands The band is a reduction on the per-seat rate, applied at the boundary automatically. The deepest published reduction is 20 % — stated here so that nobody has to negotiate towards a number we were always going to stop at. Above the banded range the licence is negotiated rather than banded, which is a different thing from a deeper automatic step and is shown as such in the table. Anticipated seat bands — per-seat instruments only Band | Reduction on the per-seat rate | What the band is measuring | 1–4 seats | LIST RATE | Annual list rate per seat. | 5–9 seats | 10% | Ten per cent off the annual list, per seat. | 10–19 seats | 20% | Twenty per cent off the annual list, per seat. | 20+ seats | NEGOTIATED | Group licence — negotiated, not banded. | More than one entity | NEGOTIATED | A group licence, not a bigger seat band. See [group licences](#group). | ### The three per-seat instruments **A seat band applies to these and to nothing else.** Everything else in the catalogue is flat-rate — one subscription for the account, however many people read it. Applying a seat band to a flat-rate instrument is a category error, not a favour: there is no per-seat rate for it to reduce. - [Epistemic Harness](https://hadalinstruments.com/instruments/epistemic-harness/) £69/seat/mo A named researcher holds a seat. The registry they write into is shared. - [Agent-Governance Constitution](https://hadalinstruments.com/instruments/agent-governance-constitution/) From £39/seat/mo — org licences from £6,000/yr A seat per engineer whose agents run under the constitution. - [HADES Terminal](https://hadalinstruments.com/instruments/hades-terminal/) £3,490/seat/yr — annual only, quarterly billing available; £49 seven-day pilot credited on conversion A seat is a person at a screen. Annual term only — see the ladder below. ## The commitment ladder One month less per year, per step down the ladder. That is the whole mechanism, and it is stated in months rather than percentages because months are what you actually pay. Anticipated commitment ladder — months paid per 12 months of service Term | Months paid per 12 served | Below rolling monthly | What you are committing to | Monthly, rolling | 12 / 12 | BASE | Cancel at the end of any month. You carry the whole commissioning cost yourself. | Annual term | 10 / 12 | 16.67% | The commissioning cost is spread across twelve months instead of one. | Two-year term | 9 / 12 | 25% | One commissioning, two years of service. Rate fixed for the term. | Three-year term | 8 / 12 | 33.33% | One commissioning, three years of service. Rate fixed for the term. | ### Read the percentage the right way round Rolling monthly billing costs 20 % more than the annual rate — 12 payments against 10 . The annual rate is therefore a 16.67 % reduction, not a 20 % one. The two numbers describe the same pair of prices from opposite ends, and the larger of them is the one a sales page would print. We print both, and we prefer the months. ### The three-year identity At the bottom rung you pay 8 months for every 12 months of service. Over three years that is: 8 months paid multiplied by 3 years equals **24 months paid** 12 months served multiplied by 3 years equals **36 months served** 24 months paid for 36 months of service — which is exactly what 2 years of rolling monthly billing costs. Three years of service for two years of monthly money. ### Why the ladder exists **Commissioning cost is front-loaded.** Support concentrates in the first days of a licence — onboarding, conventions, the first real measurement against your own data, the first argument about what a number means. That is a real cost and it is paid once, not monthly. A longer term spreads it across more months of service, and the ladder is the customer's share of that saving. The other half of the reasoning is preference, stated with a number rather than a sentiment: a client who commits for three years is worth more to me than a higher monthly rate, because a committed book is what lets one person publish the methodology and maintain the instruments instead of spending the year chasing renewals. The reduction is what that preference costs me, and it is published rather than negotiated case by case, so nobody has to ask for it in order to receive it. The same preference holds on engagements: a retained relationship is worth more to me than a higher single-engagement fee, multi-engagement scopes are agreed in writing, and what is agreed is the scope — never a gag on the findings. It is also why the Terminal has no rolling-monthly rung at all: its support cost concentrates so hard in the first days that a short tenure burns the commissioning without ever amortising it. Its ladder starts at the annual step, and its evaluation route is a paid pilot credited in full on conversion rather than a free trial. **A reduction whose arithmetic you can check is not a dark pattern; a clock ticking beside a price is one.** There is no clock on this site and no struck-through price either, because a price that was never charged is not a price — it is a stage prop. Every figure here is a rate we would actually invoice. ### Quarterly billing Available on any annual term. It softens cash flow, not commitment: the term is unchanged, the ladder rung is unchanged, and the total is unchanged. It is a payment schedule rather than a fourth tier, and it is listed here so nobody has to ask whether it exists. ## Worked example: twelve seats, three years A research group licensing the [Epistemic Harness](https://hadalinstruments.com/instruments/epistemic-harness/) for 12 named researchers, on a three-year term. Every step is shown, because the point of the example is the order of operations rather than the total. Anticipated figures — seat band applied first, term ladder second Step | Arithmetic | Result | List rate | Epistemic Harness, one seat, billed monthly | £69.00 / seat / month | Seat band | 12 seats falls in the 10–19 seats band | £55.20 / seat / month | Term | Three-year term — 8 months paid per 12 months of service | £441.60 / seat / year of service | Seats | £441.60 × 12 seats | £5,299.20 / year of service | Term total | £5,299.20 × 3 years | £15,897.60 for 36 months of service | ### The discounts multiply — they do not add The seat band is a factor and the term rung is a factor, so they compose by multiplication. A 20 % seat band and a 33.33 % term step do not land at 53.33 %. They land at 46.67 %. - **List rate over the same 36 months, billed monthly** — £29,808.00 - **Banded and termed, as calculated above** — £15,897.60 - **Difference** — £13,910.40 - **What adding the two percentages would have predicted** — £13,910.40 - **How far that misreading is out** — £1,987.20 Effective rate across the whole term: £36.80 per seat per month, against a list of £69.00 . We publish the shortfall against the additive reading rather than letting a buyer find it in their own spreadsheet after the conversation, because that is the version of this number that costs us something to print. ## Group licences for multiple entities A group licence is one agreement spanning affiliated entities: brands under a holding company, desks under a fund, venues under an operator, subsidiaries under a group. It is negotiated rather than banded, and the reason is specific — **the support surface scales with entities, not with seats.** Four seats in one entity is one onboarding, one escalation path, one set of conventions. Four seats across four entities is four of each, and no seat ladder can price that difference because a seat ladder is not measuring it. ### What a group licence adds - **One agreement, one invoice.** Not one negotiation per entity and not one renewal date per desk. - **Named onboarding.** A person, named in the agreement, who commissions each entity and knows what the previous one decided. - **Shared receipt-corpus access.** One corpus, reachable from every entity, so a figure raised in one place can be verified in another without a re-issue request. - **Consistent methodology versions across every entity.** This is the one that matters. Instruments are versioned, and a definition can change between versions. Two desks in the same group running different versions are reading different definitions of the same metric while believing they are comparing like with like — and they will find out at the worst possible moment, in a meeting, in front of a risk committee. A group licence pins the version across the group and moves everyone together. **The last point is the argument, not the invoice.** An internal disagreement about a number is expensive in a way that a licence line item is not, and it is the failure mode a group licence is actually built to prevent. Multi-network operators — several venues, several brands, one measurement standard — are the case this was designed around. If that is you, the scoping conversation starts with entity count, not seat count. ## The doors register Every commercial arrangement we will enter, and every one we will not. The second list is the useful one: a vendor who will not tell you what they refuse has not decided yet, and the answer you get later depends on the size of the cheque. - **Register version** — 1.2 - **Issued** — 2026-08-03 - **Entries** — 23 - **Status** — ANTICIPATED ### Doors open OPEN NOW is in force today. AT LAUNCH exists when instrument checkout opens and is not purchasable today. NEGOTIATED is scoped in conversation rather than looked up on a table. #### The Assay Desk — one measurement, run for you AT LAUNCH Pay-per-test on your own artifact: a fixed menu of run-once measurements — overfit, execution cost, dataset forensics and the rest — on the instruments’ published methods, returned as a written, hash-pinned report. Fixed menu and fixed price is what keeps it a product rather than consulting; the menu and anticipated pricing are published now, and intake opens with a payment rail and a proper submission channel (OR-030) [The full menu](https://hadalinstruments.com/assays/). #### Self-serve, single instrument AT LAUNCH One instrument, one subscription, no conversation with anybody. This is the default and it is designed to stay the default — support capacity is the constraint on this business, so a buyer who never needs us is the buyer the architecture is built for. #### Marketplace SKU AT LAUNCH cTrader Store first, MQL5 Market second. The marketplace build is fully functional standalone at its price — never paid-but-crippled — and the site tier is priced at or below the marketplace-equivalent, so the platform fee never inverts your margin. #### Suite licence AT LAUNCH One instrument family, complete, on a single agreement. Every instrument in the family, its premium tiers, and the family receipt page. [the seven suites](https://hadalinstruments.com/suites/). #### The Hadal Desk bundle AT LAUNCH The Terminal shell plus the engines you choose, at a stated reduction on the sum of the parts rather than at the sum. The shell is the provenance seat; the engines are peers that plug into it and are licensed separately. [what a Terminal seat includes](https://hadalinstruments.com/instruments/hades-terminal/). #### Multi-seat bands AT LAUNCH Published, automatic, and applied without asking. Three instruments are licensed per seat; the band is read off the ladder on this page, not negotiated case by case. #### Multi-entity group licence NEGOTIATED One agreement across affiliated entities, brands, desks or venues. Negotiated because the support surface scales with entities rather than with seats — two entities are two onboardings, two escalation paths and two sets of conventions, whether they hold four seats or forty. #### Multi-year term with a fixed rate AT LAUNCH A two- or three-year term fixes the per-seat rate for the whole term. List prices move; a signed term does not move with them. Renewal is at the then-current list, stated in the agreement rather than discovered at renewal. #### Configured engagement AT LAUNCH The Integrity Services instruments are commissioned rather than subscribed, against published floors. The floor is the point: an engagement below it stops being product discovery and becomes a job. [Integrity Services](https://hadalinstruments.com/suites/services/). #### Retainer after an engagement AT LAUNCH A completed engagement can convert to an ongoing retainer. It never runs the other way round — a retainer is not the entry rung, because the engagement is what establishes whether there is anything worth retaining. #### Published artifact and data licence OPEN NOW The measurement artifacts, the methodology and the receipts corpus carry their own reuse terms, and those terms are in force today. No account, no waitlist, no permission request. [the artifact licence](https://hadalinstruments.com/licence/). #### Academic and non-commercial research access AT LAUNCH Gated on role and affiliation rather than on price, at 50% of the annual list price, on the 6 instruments whose subject matter is research methodology. A licence is held by a named academic — faculty, permanent research staff or a principal investigator — and students are covered under that holder's licence rather than individually. [eligibility and terms](https://hadalinstruments.com/academic/). ### Doors closed, and what would open each one 4 of these 11 are closed permanently — there is no offer, no scale and no future ruling that opens them. The rest name their own condition. #### Broker payment for measurement, placement, or removal from the Observatory CLOSED PERMANENTLY Measuring venues while taking venue money is the exact conflict the Observatory exists to escape. A venue cannot buy a measurement, buy a position in a list, buy an earlier publication date, or buy its portrait down. What would open it Nothing. There is no figure, no structure and no future scale at which this opens. If it ever did, every measurement published before it would be retrospectively worthless, which is the whole reason it cannot. #### Introducing-broker and affiliate revenue from measured venues CLOSED BY RULING A rating pipeline and a revenue pipeline that are the same pipeline is the structure of every review site nobody believes. The stream was designed, costed, and then deferred by ruling before a penny of it existed. What would open it Post-scale, with professional counsel, and only if the money can be structurally decoupled from the measurement — published disclosure on every surface, links present wherever a relationship exists regardless of what the measurements say, and a recomputable proof that nothing crossed. Today it cannot be, so the door stays shut with its hinges intact. #### Gag clauses, findings suppression, pre-publication veto CLOSED PERMANENTLY A finding you can suppress is not a finding. We hold relationships only where the right to publish accurate measurements is contractually unrestricted, and where a partner later introduces a publication restriction the relationship ends and the profile stays. What would open it Nothing. This applies to every counterparty class without exception — venues, clients, academics, and the entity paying for a configured engagement. #### Ranked broker league tables and composite scores CLOSED PERMANENTLY A single editorial number is precisely the judgement surface that corruption needs. Every venue gets the identical battery and a multi-dimensional profile; there is no composite, no star rating and no ordering. What would open it Nothing. Profiles, never rankings. Alphabetical order is the only order the Observatory publishes in. #### Performance claims, signals, managed money, investment advice CLOSED PERMANENTLY These are analytical instruments for discretionary use. They measure instrument and process behaviour; they do not forecast, recommend, allocate or manage. What would open it Nothing. This is the first leg of the standing disclaimer and it is a design boundary rather than a legal hedge. #### Hourly consulting and small custom work CLOSED BY RULING Never hourly, never small. Configured engagements carry published floors so that the work stays product discovery — a configuration that becomes a template SKU — instead of quietly becoming a job with one client and no product at the end of it. What would open it Nothing on the hourly axis. Work below the floor is declined rather than discounted, because a floor that bends is a rate card with extra steps. #### More than two concurrent configured engagements CLOSED TODAY Two at a time is the cap. Engagements are delivered by people, and the number of them that can run at once is a capacity fact rather than a commercial preference. What would open it Measured support capacity above the current threshold — not demand. Demand is the reason a cap gets broken; capacity is the only reason it should move. #### Private-forever custom features CLOSED BY RULING Custom once, product forever. Every configuration built during an engagement becomes a template SKU available to everyone, including your competitors. We state this before anyone commissions anything, because a buyer who discovers it afterwards is entitled to be angry. What would open it Nothing on offer. The engagement fee buys the configuration, the delivery and the priority; it does not buy a private branch, a buy-out or exclusivity over the shape of the work. If that is a hard requirement, this is the wrong supplier and we would rather say so at the first meeting than at the third. #### Free tier and free marketplace listings CLOSED BY RULING A free tool anchors the work at zero and never recovers. A paid tool with a trial teaches the price while letting you taste the product — and a paid-at-the-door listing has to stand on its own, which is a useful discipline to be forced into. What would open it Nothing. Trials run on each platform’s native mechanics instead, and the Terminal offers a paid pilot credited in full on conversion rather than a free one. #### On-premise and air-gapped deployment CLOSED TODAY Not refused on principle — simply not built. There is no deployment path we could hand you today that we would be willing to support, and shipping one we cannot support is worse than not shipping one. What would open it A ruling from me and a documented, supportable deployment path. If this is a hard requirement for you, say so on the launch list — a requirement stated before the architecture sets is worth more than one raised after. #### Reseller, white-label and OEM CLOSED TODAY A reseller channel puts a layer between the measurement and the person reading it, and support arrives through that layer having already been through a game of telephone. What would open it A ruling I would only take post-scale. Not before there is a support organisation that can stand behind a partner’s promises as well as Hadal’s own. ## This register is versioned and append-only The register above carries a version and an issue date for the same reason the methodology and the [kill ledger](https://hadalinstruments.com/glossary/kill-ledger/) do:**a commercial policy you can rewrite overnight is a marketing page.** A closed door only means something if the act of opening it leaves a mark. - **Every change publishes before it takes effect.** A new door, a closed door reopened, a band moved, a rung changed — the entry appears in the [site changelog](https://hadalinstruments.com/changelog/) first. Never silently, never retroactively, and never discovered by a customer at renewal. - **Entries are appended, not edited.** A superseded entry stays where it is with its successor beneath it. A register whose author can quietly revise it carries no information about its author. - **The version on this page moves when the register moves.** If the version is unchanged, nothing on this page has changed since you last read it. - **Nothing here is retroactive.** A signed term is held at the terms it was signed under. A ladder that changes changes for new agreements. ## How to negotiate today Honestly: there is not much to negotiate with yet. Nothing is purchasable, there is no sales team, and no enquiry address is published — see [the contact page](https://hadalinstruments.com/contact/) for every channel that exists and every one that does not. **The one channel that works is the launch list.** Join it and say what you need — *seat count, entity count, term*. Those three numbers are the entire scoping conversation, and sending them now means the conversation starts at the second question instead of the first. **Group and multi-year enquiries are read first.** Not as a courtesy — long-term committed clients are who this business is built around, and a multi-entity requirement stated before the commercial architecture sets is worth considerably more to us than one raised after. ### Trial mechanics, by delivery class One home for what every instrument page states in a sentence. None of it is live: this site has no checkout, no card capture, and no product account to create. - **Hub subscriptions** — thirty days on the hub tier: a full natural proof cycle, disclosed in plain words before you start it, and cancellable in one step. A marketplace SKU uses that platform's native trial or rental period instead. - **Seat and deployment licences** — thirty days on a seat, disclosed in plain words before you start it and cancellable in one step. Deployment licences are scoped in writing before they begin. The Terminal is the exception: no free trial — a paid token pilot, credited in full on conversion. - **Engagements** — no trial period. Scope, method and deliverable are agreed in writing first, and the deliverable is the ledger itself — every item with its status and its evidence, including the ones that came back unverifiable. Early Access ## Tell us how many seats, how many entities, how long Join the launch list. Group and multi-year enquiries are read first — they are the ones that shape what gets built. here would have added one landmark per placement, which on the homepage means a landmark list that is mostly disclaimer. --> Standing policy - **No promise of profit, ever.** Hadal makes no performance claims and carries no implied edge. Past measurements describe instrument behaviour — never future returns. - **You own risk management.** Hadal cannot control it and does not insure it. Good tools do not fix bad discipline — and this site says so. - **Analytical tools, for discretionary use.** Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to trade. Every decision, and every outcome, is yours. The same statement stands in the footer of every page.[Terms](https://hadalinstruments.com/terms/) [Privacy](https://hadalinstruments.com/privacy/) ## Common questions - **Does Hadal take money from the brokers it measures?** — No, and the door is closed permanently rather than currently unused. A venue cannot pay to be measured, cannot pay for placement, cannot pay for an earlier publication date and cannot pay to have its portrait removed. Measuring venues while taking venue money is the exact conflict the Observatory exists to escape, so there is no figure and no structure at which this opens. - **Can a broker pay to have a finding removed or delayed?** — No. Gag clauses, findings suppression and pre-publication veto are closed permanently and the rule applies to every counterparty class — venues, clients, academics and anyone commissioning an engagement. We hold relationships only where the right to publish accurate measurements is contractually unrestricted. If a partner later introduces a publication restriction, the relationship ends and the profile stays. - **What is actually negotiable?** — Two of the three axes. Seat bands are published and applied automatically, so there is nothing to negotiate there. Entity count is negotiated, because a group licence spanning affiliated entities changes the support surface rather than the seat count. Term is negotiated in the sense that a longer commitment moves you down a published ladder — the ladder itself is fixed and printed on this page. - **Why does a longer term cost less per year?** — Because commissioning cost is front-loaded and we would rather share the saving than keep it. Support concentrates in the first days of a licence — onboarding, conventions, the first real measurement — and a longer term amortises that real cost across more months of service. The reduction is your share of a measured saving, not a sale. A discount whose arithmetic you can check is not a dark pattern; a clock ticking beside a price is one, and there is no clock anywhere on this site. - **Do the seat band and the term discount add together?** — No, they multiply. Applying the seat band first and the term ladder second gives a smaller combined reduction than adding the two percentages would suggest, and this page shows the arithmetic on a worked example rather than asserting the result. Reading them as additive overstates the saving, which is why the calculation is published instead of summarised. - **Can I buy Hadal instruments today?** — No. Nothing on this site is purchasable: there is no checkout, no cart and no payment link on any page. The figures published across the site are anticipated terms rather than offers. Group and multi-year enquiries can be sent to the published contact route, and the launch list is where ratified figures are announced first. - **Can this commercial policy change without notice?** — No. The doors register is versioned and append-only, exactly like the methodology and the kill ledger. Any change to it publishes in the site changelog before it takes effect, never silently and never retroactively. A commercial policy its author can rewrite overnight carries no information about its author, which is the same argument that governs every other record we keep. ## What this page does not establish - **These are anticipated terms.** Every band, rung, figure and floor on this page is indicative and awaits ratification. None of them is final, confirmed or current, and any of them may change before there is anything to sign. - **Nothing here is an offer.** This page describes a commercial architecture. It does not offer to sell anything, it cannot be accepted, and there is no checkout on this site to accept it with. - **No agreement exists until one is signed.** Reading this page, joining the launch list, or discussing a seat count creates no licence, no obligation and no entitlement to any figure printed here. - **The closed doors are policy, not law.** They bind us because they are published and versioned, not because a statute requires them. That is precisely why they are published and versioned. Related: [the pricing model](https://hadalinstruments.com/pricing/) ·[refunds and cancellation](https://hadalinstruments.com/refunds/) ·[terms](https://hadalinstruments.com/terms/) ·[artifact and data licence](https://hadalinstruments.com/licence/) ·[changelog](https://hadalinstruments.com/changelog/)