Licensing
Exolvra tiers gate features and user counts. This page covers activating a license key, reading your current entitlements, tracking seat usage, and what happens when a license expires.
What this page is for
Exolvra is open-source and the core platform works fully without a license — you can self-host indefinitely on the Free tier. Licenses unlock higher user counts, audit retention, compliance features, and enterprise integrations. The Licensing admin page is where you activate a license key, check your current tier, and monitor seat usage.
The tiers
| Tier | Users | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | Full core platform: agents, projects, issues, workflows, runbooks, MCP, chat, the Bot API. No license key needed. |
| Pro | 3 | Adds email notifications, extended audit retention, team scoping |
| Team | 15 | Adds multi-team deployments, per-team budget caps, approval workflows |
| Enterprise | unlimited | Adds SSO, advanced audit retention, compliance exports, custom skills marketplace |
Tier names and feature breakdowns change occasionally. The admin page always shows the exact entitlements for your current license.
Common tasks
Activate a license key
- Obtain a license key (from the Exolvra team or your vendor)
- Open
/admin/license - Paste the key into the License key field
- Click Activate
- Exolvra validates the key locally — no phone-home — and displays the tier, seat count, and expiry
License validation is offline. The key is a signed payload that Exolvra verifies against a known public key at validation time. You don’t need internet access to activate a license, and Exolvra never calls an external licensing server.
Check current entitlements
Open /admin/license. The page shows:
- Current tier
- Organisation — the name the license was issued to
- Seats — how many users the license allows and how many you’re using
- Issued and Expires — dates
- Features — the full list of capability flags enabled by this tier
If the license is near expiration, a yellow banner appears on every admin page as a reminder.
Upgrade a license
Upgrades are a license swap: obtain a new key for the higher tier, paste it into the activation field, save. The old key is replaced by the new one immediately. All existing data, users, and projects are preserved.
Downgrade a license
Downgrades work the same way — paste the new (lower-tier) key and save. There’s one catch: if the new tier has a lower seat count than your current user count, Exolvra blocks the activation with an error. You need to deactivate users first until you fit under the new seat limit.
Seat usage
The Licensing page tracks how many active (non-deactivated) users you have against the license’s seat count. Deactivated users don’t count; deleted users don’t count. If you’re at 14 of 15 seats and want to add another user, you either need to upgrade or deactivate someone first.
What happens when a license expires
Expired licenses enter a 30-day grace period during which Exolvra keeps working normally, but a warning banner appears on every admin page. After the grace period:
- The instance downgrades to Free tier behavior — features above free become locked
- Users above the free-tier seat limit are not automatically removed, but new sessions from those users are refused with a licensing error
- All data remains intact — no deletion, no corruption
- Re-activating with a valid license restores full access immediately
Expiration is never a silent failure. You get banner warnings 30 days before, on expiration, and through the grace period. You also get audit log events on every transition.
Offline deployments
Licenses work fully offline. Exolvra doesn’t call home, doesn’t check a remote server, doesn’t phone in usage telemetry. The license is a signed payload verified locally on activation and then cached in the database. An instance can run air-gapped indefinitely with a valid license.
That also means license revocation doesn’t work the way SaaS licensing usually does — once a key is activated, Exolvra trusts it until the expires_at date passes. The signing mechanism means nobody can forge a key, but it also means you can’t remotely disable one.
Common pitfalls
Letting a license lapse without a reminder. The warning banners appear in the dashboard, but if nobody’s actively logging into the admin pages, they can go unseen. Set a calendar reminder for your expiry date or configure an email notification.
Running above the seat limit. If you’re on a 15-seat license and create a 16th user, Exolvra refuses at creation time. If you’re close to the limit, deactivate users who’ve left the team before they become the 16th blocker.
Confusing Free-tier limits with expired-license limits. Free-tier is the baseline Exolvra experience and is always available. An expired Pro/Team/Enterprise license downgrades you to Free until you renew — data is safe, but higher-tier features stop working. Don’t confuse “expired” with “uninstalled”.
Where to go next
- Users & teams — manage seat usage
- Admin overview — the broader setup checklist
- Security and cloud mode — hardening a deployed instance