Commercial & pilots
Pangolin Scale is free to build on. Self-host it, evaluate it, run your own production workloads — no cost, no conversation needed. The one thing the license reserves is offering Pangolin Scale (or a derivative) to third parties as a hosted or managed orchestration / agent-dispatch service — that needs a commercial license. And if you’re embedding Pangolin Scale in a product you ship, or you need the enterprise compliance layer and a support contract, let’s talk — that’s the commercial relationship that keeps the engine sustainably maintained.
Who this is for
Section titled “Who this is for”You’re building an agent product — and your buyers are security- or compliance-conscious (healthcare, finance, legal, gov, or any team that asks “where does it run, and can you prove what it did?”). Pangolin Scale lets you answer that: deterministic, credential-sealed execution in your customer’s own account, emitting a verifiable audit bundle they can check independently — tamper-detecting by default, tamper-evident at the S3 Object Lock (WORM) tier with a signed root — so the security review becomes your funnel, not your wall.
The “what ran, to the byte” half is shippable and demoable today. The authorized → ran → on whose behalf chain of custody is the direction we build with design partners — not a finished product you wait on.
Start with a pilot (white-glove)
Section titled “Start with a pilot (white-glove)”For the first partners, we are the platform: we set Pangolin Scale up around your agents, run them in your account, and hand you the audit bundle — free, in exchange for blunt feedback and the 2–3 things you’d pay for. No build on your side, no procurement marathon.
Licensing tiers
Section titled “Licensing tiers”| Tier | For | License |
|---|---|---|
| Community | internal use, evaluation, dev/test, your own production, self-hosting | BSL (free) — full engine, self-host, audit bundle |
| Commercial | offering Pangolin Scale (or a derivative) to third parties as a hosted or managed service; or embedding it in a product you ship and want on a clear commercial footing | commercial license |
| Enterprise | the above plus SSO/RBAC, compliance-evidence tooling (retention / attestation / export), and support/SLA | commercial license + Enterprise modules |
| Cloud (later, demand-pulled) | teams who want it hosted — where the logs are the chain of custody | subscription |
The license’s one hard restriction today is the hosted/managed-service case — that’s what the BSL Additional Use Grant reserves. Embedding Pangolin Scale into a product others self-host is permitted by the current grant; the commercial track there is about support, indemnity, and a stable footing as the grant evolves — not a license you’re compelled to buy. The LICENSE is always authoritative.
The Community engine is the real thing, not crippleware: it runs fully standalone. The Enterprise modules are seam implementations (RBAC, SSO, compliance tooling, the witness audit tier) that plug into the open engine’s extension points. See the project roadmap for which seams ship open and which implementations are Enterprise, and Licensing & BSL for the current grant.