Roadmap: Open-Core Packaging and Pricing Strategy

Status (2026-10-13): Unchanged and still owner-gated: no tiers, pricing, license split, billing or hosted offering exist, and no decision memo has been recorded. Everything in the repository, including the newer wikantik-connectors and wikantik-insights modules, remains in the single Apache 2.0 reactor. The modules the open-core seam would separate out (ACL sync, fleet control plane, retrieval-quality dashboard, retrieval audit pack) have not been built; see RoadmapExternalAclInheritance and RoadmapMultiTenancyPosture. The seven connector types that now exist are all in the free core, so the "base connectors stay open" half of the proposed split is already the shipped state.

This brief is [OWNER]-gated end-to-end. Pricing, license splits, tier definitions, target segment, and any commercial commitment are owner decisions. Agents working this brief prepare decision inputs — verified market data, unit-economics models, license-mechanics comparisons — and stop at a decision memo. No agent produces a binding design (a price, a license text, a published tier) from this page.

Gap statement: no packaging at all, in a market with clear price anchors

Wikantik is an Apache 2.0 codebase with no commercial packaging: no tiers, no hosted offering, no support contract, no published pricing. That is fine for an open-source project; it is disqualifying for a service. This brief is deliberately last-sequenced — the monetizable features are exactly the Tier 1–2 roadmap items, so packaging follows capability, not the reverse. It exists now so that capability designs keep the packaging seam in mind.

Market grounding: the anchors

Current Wikantik state

Proposed direction

  1. Open-core split, following the validated seam: core stays Apache 2.0 (wiki, retrieval, bundle, MCP servers, ontology, base connectors). Paid enterprise modules: connector ACL sync (RoadmapExternalAclInheritance), fleet management / control plane (RoadmapMultiTenancyPosture), retrieval-quality dashboard (RoadmapRetrievalEvaluationObservability), retrieval audit/compliance pack (RoadmapCompliancePosture).
  2. Hosted single-tenant tier ("managed silo"): a provisioned dedicated instance per customer — the multi-tenancy posture is the hosted product. Priced flat per instance + size band, not per seat, undercutting per-seat incumbents for small teams.
  3. Publish a transparent ladder early (Ragie's lesson): even 'free self-host / $X managed / talk-to-us enterprise' beats silence, and forces the cost-floor homework.
  4. Support/services tier for self-hosters as the lowest-machinery first revenue.

Agent-executable slice and acceptance criteria

There is no autonomous "Phase 1 implementation" for this brief. The agent-executable slice is decision-input preparation:

  1. A verified pricing snapshot: re-check every anchor above against current public pricing pages (they churn fast) and record source + date per figure.
  2. A unit-economics model: the per-tenant cost floor from RoadmapMultiTenancyPosture's [MEASURE] work + provisioning labor → minimum viable managed price, compared against per-seat anchors for a 10-seat team.
  3. A license-mechanics comparison: separate commercial modules (Onyx model) vs license-key gating in one artifact, with fork-friendliness and Apache-2.0-purity implications laid out.

Done when: the three inputs exist as a decision memo presenting options with trade-offs — and the memo explicitly does not recommend a single price. The owner decides from it.

Verify before designing on these

Every number in the market-grounding section is a verify-first claim: the per-seat anchors, the Ragie ladder, the market-size projection, and the "95% of pilots fail" figure are all vendor-adjacent and dated 2026-07. The pricing-snapshot task above is the verification.

Non-goals

Investigation starting points

See Also