How a Hadal licence is shaped

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.

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.

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.

• P4
  Epistemic Harness£69/seat/moA named researcher holds a seat. The registry they write into is shared.
• P5
  Agent-Governance ConstitutionFrom £39/seat/mo — org licences from £6,000/yrA seat per engineer whose agents run under the constitution.
• P16
  HADES Terminal£3,490/seat/yr — annual only, quarterly billing available; £49 seven-day pilot credited on conversionA 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.

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:

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 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.

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.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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 itNothing. 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 itPost-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 itNothing. 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 itNothing. 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 itNothing. 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 itNothing 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 itMeasured 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 itNothing 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 itNothing. 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 itA 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 itA 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 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 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 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.

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.