Billing & detach
How engines are billed (a one-time license per engine, then yearly support), and how to cancel — destroy vs detach.
A new Context Engine is bought with an on-prem license, paid once per installation. The license includes the first year of support & updates; from the second year, support is a yearly subscription. The license is yours: if you stop support, the engine keeps running on the version it has, it just gets no further updates. You're never paying for the right to keep using what you've got; support pays for us to keep improving it.
Engines bought before this change stay on their annual subscription, unchanged.
A running engine is a known, flat cost — no usage meters to watch.
What it costs
What a new engine costs:
| Plan | First year | Every year after |
|---|---|---|
| On-prem license (paid once) | $6,000 | $1,000 |
The first-year price is the license, charged at checkout; the yearly price is support, first charged one year after purchase. New engines are multi-user: the single-user (Personal) plan is no longer sold. (Prices are shown live from the current catalog above; existing subscriptions keep the prices they were created at, even if the catalog changes.)
Deploying = checkout
Provisioning is pay-first: the deploy wizard ends at a checkout where you accept the licence/terms and add a card, then Stripe charges the license. The same checkout starts the support subscription, with its first charge one year later. The engine only provisions after payment. Your first invoice shows the license and the included year of support; each later invoice is one year of support.
If a deploy fails after checkout, you're not stranded: the engine shows an alert and can be retried (Redeploy).
Seeing & managing billing
- Engine overview → a Billing card: status, plan, and the next charge: when support & updates renew and for how much (for an annual subscription, its renewal date and amount).
- Billing page (org Owner) → subscriptions, invoices, payment method, and a Cancel subscription action per engine.
When support isn't renewed
If a support payment fails or support is cancelled, a licensed engine keeps running: it is never suspended or removed for it. It stays on the version it has, and upgrades are paused until support is paid again.
Cancelling — destroy vs detach
Cancelling forces a choice:
- Cancel & delete (destroy) — tears the engine down (container + databases permanently removed) and cancels the subscription. Back up first if you might want the data.
- Cancel & keep (detach) — the non-destructive option: Relote stops managing the engine but it keeps running on its own.
On a trial (annual subscriptions only), cancelling always deletes — an unpaid trial can't be turned into a perpetual keep.
Detach — taking an engine and leaving
Detach is the supported way to cancel a managed engine and keep it running independently. When you detach:
- You get a one-time hand-off of the keys the engine needs to self-host — most importantly its
APP_KEY(the master key to all its data) — plus a downloadable one-pager. - A detachment record captures the hand-off, and the customer keeps a perpetual, frozen licence to the version they're on — it won't stop working (no updates, SLA, or managed backups after that).
- Existing sealed backups stay in the customer's storage and restore with their recovery key.
To put a detached engine on its own domain over HTTPS, follow the self-hosting guide.
This is deliberate — it's what lets you offer managed hosting without lock-in, an easy promise to make to customers.