Plans & billing
Billing follows the workspace that owns the work. A personal Standard subscription belongs to your user account. An Enterprise subscription belongs to the selected organization. Upgrading one does not upgrade the other.
For current prices and the exact included feature list, use the LightNow Pricing page. The documentation explains ownership and billing operations without duplicating a price table that can become stale.
Plans in one view
| Plan | Billing owner | Intended use |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Personal account or organization | Evaluate LightNow with unlimited personal or organization Runtime Profiles and LightNow-managed secrets |
| Standard | Personal account | Professional individual workflows, including a personal HashiCorp Vault KV v2 provider |
| Enterprise | Organization | Shared workspaces, SSO, governance, organization-wide device inventory and an organization Vault provider |
Runtime Profile count is not a plan entitlement. Every personal and organization workspace can create as many named profiles as needed, select any active profile as its default and use those profiles for client configuration. Plans still control separate capabilities such as private-server limits, external Vault providers, supported managed-client rollouts and device inventory scope.
Device inventory follows the same ownership model. Free observes the personal device used by its Local Proxy client, Standard expands this to supported personal clients and devices, and Enterprise adds organization-wide devices with user attribution for owners and admins. Presence requires metadata telemetry; disabling it also disables registration and heartbeats.
These boundaries are enforced by the Registry API. Free rejects a second new
personal device or client instance, and organization inventory returns
PLAN_UPGRADE_REQUIRED without Enterprise or Enterprise Dedicated. Existing
records are retained across downgrades rather than deleted automatically.
LightNow's self-service Pricing page currently offers these three plans. Do not infer a fourth purchasable tier from feature or deployment discussions. Custom deployment requirements are a sales conversation, not a self-service billing state documented here.
Choose the billing context first
Before starting checkout, answer one question: who should own the subscription?
- Use Personal when Standard should apply to your own workspace.
- Select the organization when Enterprise should apply to a team workspace.
- Confirm the context indicator before opening checkout.
- After checkout returns, verify the plan in that same context.
Organization membership does not make a personal checkout an organization checkout. The selected context is part of the billing operation.
Manage personal billing
Use Account → Billing for your personal plan, invoices and payment methods.
- Upgrade plan starts Standard checkout for the signed-in user.
- Manage subscription opens the billing portal for the current personal subscription.
- Cancel plan schedules the move back to Free at the end of the current billing period.
A scheduled cancellation does not immediately remove Standard. The account page shows the current plan, billing status and period end used for the pending downgrade.
When the downgrade becomes effective, existing Vault provider configuration and references remain encrypted but cannot be managed or resolved until Standard is active again.
Manage organization billing
Select the organization before opening its billing surface. Organization billing is separate from Account → Billing and requires an organization role that may manage the subscription.
If Enterprise checkout starts from Pricing:
- with an organization selected, LightNow opens that organization's billing path;
- without an organization selected, LightNow first routes the user to create an organization.
After checkout, return to the same organization and verify its plan and billing status before configuring SSO, organization Vault or managed-client policy. Shared Runtime Profiles do not require an upgrade. Organization Vault configuration is retained but blocked after an effective downgrade to Free and is reactivated by Enterprise.
If an upgrade is not visible
Check the ownership path before treating the problem as a feature failure:
- Confirm whether Personal or an organization is selected.
- Open the matching Billing surface and inspect its current plan and status.
- Confirm that checkout was completed for the same user or organization.
- Refresh the account or organization data after returning from checkout.
- For organization billing, confirm that your current role can manage it.
Do not switch context merely to make a control appear. That can start checkout for the wrong billing owner.
Continue from here
- Users, organizations and contexts explains how workspace selection affects ownership.
- Runtime Profiles explains personal and organization profile scope.
- Control Plane device inventory explains visibility, presence, privacy, and device actions.
- Runtime secrets and HashiCorp Vault explains managed values, external references and plan boundaries.
- Quickstart gets one client running before a team rollout or plan decision.