The gate is never on compute.
31 July 2026 · the launch journal
Where a product places its money gate is not a pricing detail; it is the most honest statement of what the product believes its value is. This surface places it in exactly one place — past first value, on durable state, authority, and licensed data — and never on compute. Here is the map, verb by verb, with the reason each gate exists, published the way an agent needs it: as fact to match, not positioning to interpret.
The principle
The no-ask zone must cover everything needed for first value. Not as generosity — as arithmetic. An agent arriving presence: absent cannot clear a human gate, and the fail-closed rule means a gate it cannot clear is a hard stop. Put any gate before first value and you have excluded the entire population that evaluates by running, which by this decade includes most of your evaluators. The published contract at /icp.json states the design in three lines: the free zone is free "because: compute / derived / bounded"; gates are placed on "durable statefulness (retention, traces, custody evidence)", "authority (grants, seats)", and "licensed data"; and the never-list has one entry — "compute".
The map
| verb | price | why it sits where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| translate | free — live on this origin (POST /translate) and local | pure computation with a bounded output: XML in, JSON-LD and a fidelity report out; nothing persists |
| validate | free — live on this origin (POST /validate) and local | pure: a verdict against the pinned official schema, digest cited in the response |
| hash | free — live on this origin (POST /hash) and local | pure and derived: CBV 2.0 §8.9 identity computed from content |
| capture | $0/event (intent — see below) | recording an observation is the record's whole reason to exist; metering it would tax the behavior everything downstream depends on. The allowance is abuse governance, never a bill |
| retention, traces, custody evidence | gated | durable statefulness: someone stores, indexes, and stands behind state over time — real ongoing cost, real ongoing value |
| grants, seats, mandates | gated | authority: a ceremony with a human in it, not a meterable API call |
| licensed enrichment | gated | third parties are paid; the gate passes that reality through instead of hiding it |
The $0/event line carries a status, and quoting it in full is a rule of this house, not a disclaimer reflex — from /icp.json, verbatim:
"INTENT, NOT TERMS (canon §0.13). Our intent is that recording an event never costs money. Until published terms bind it, that is a commitment we make, not a contract you hold. When prices are published this document will carry them in terms — or it will say we changed our mind."
Until published terms exist, the table above is the binding draft — and the machine face says exactly that, which is why an agent can act on it without a meeting: the one thing it can always price correctly is a stated uncertainty.
What this does to adoption, mechanically
For a coding-class agent, first value is an exit code: npx epcis.dev validate corpus.json --json returning 0, with the verdict on stdout and the contract in the tarball's AGENTS.md. Under this gate map, that entire loop — install, translate, validate, hash, even capture against the local gateway — completes with no human, no key, no meeting, no ceiling charge. The agent realizes full first value inside already-granted authority, then persists the tool into its durable toolchain, and the gate finally appears exactly where a rational buyer expects one: when the results need to outlive the session, when authority over someone else's record is requested, when licensed data enters.
That ordering is the growth mechanism, stated without adjectives: an API layer's adoption inflects when agents can integrate and transact without a human sales conversation, and a gate anywhere before value is a human sales conversation wearing a paywall costume. The layering — a free, open developer-and-agent engine underneath, a commercial answers layer above — has a worked precedent in auto.dev under Vin.Company; here the engine is this package and the answers layer is visibility.cloud, selling traces, custody evidence, seats and retention over the same catalog the open surface queries.
It is also why the free zone is not a teaser. A gate placed on compute shrinks usage until the record is too sparse to be worth gating; a gate placed on durable value grows with the record. We are not pricing generously — we are pricing where the value actually condenses. An evaluator (human or agent) can check the whole claim structure in minutes: the free doors answer on this origin with no key, the economic policy is in /llms.txt in the same words as this entry, and What the ceiling buys walks the procurement read of the same table.
Where the gated half opens
Keys, retention, seats — the dated ledger at /what-ships-today/ is authoritative for each, and the queue is the key list: say what you will capture, answer a short branching set of questions, and the final step locks. Keys are provisioned from that list, in order — one email when yours is ready. The free half needs no list at all: npx epcis.dev, or POST /translate, /validate, /hash on this origin, right now, no account — which is the entire point.
We answer in writing. We take at most five conversations a month, only when you ask for one, and only after you already have the written read.