Users, tenants and contexts

LightNow separates user accounts from organization tenants.

Understanding this model is important for:

• interpreting what you see in the UI,
• configuring SSO and tenant branding,
• understanding how plans and billing are applied.

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User accounts

A user is an individual identity in LightNow, usually backed by an identity provider (IdP), a social login or your company IdP.

Characteristics:

• Identified by a stable subject (sub) and email address in the JWT.
• May have a plan (for example free or standard) attached directly to the user.
• Can mark user favorites for MCP servers.
• Can create and manage organizations (depending on plan and feature gates).

In the JWT, user information looks roughly like:

{
  "sub": "8dba…",
  "email": "user@example.com",
  "name": "Jane Doe",
  "scope": "openid profile email registry:read registry:write"
}

Tenants (organizations)

A tenant represents an organization or workspace in LightNow:

• Has its own ID, name and subdomain (for example acme → acme.lightnow.ai).
• Can have its own plan (typically enterprise or a higher tier).
• Has its own configuration:
• SSO / federation settings,
• branding (logo + colors),
• policies and governance.
• Has a set of members (users) with roles such as owner.

Context switching in the UI

When you are logged in, LightNow distinguishes between:

• User context – you act as yourself (personal plan, user favorites, user billing).
• Tenant context – you act on behalf of a selected tenant (tenant favorites, tenant branding, tenant billing).

In the UI this is visible as:

• A profile menu that shows your user identity,
• A list of organizations you belong to,
• A context switcher to jump between user and tenant context.

Actions are applied accordingly:

• When in user context, favorites are written to user-level settings.
• When in tenant context, favorites and settings apply to the selected tenant and must include a tenant header when calling the Registry-API.

Plans per user vs. plans per tenant

LightNow supports different plans on two levels:

• User plans (Free / Standard)
• Tenant plans (Enterprise / Enterprise Dedicated)

Typical setup:

• A user upgrades their account to Standard to manage private MCP servers and see more trust details.
• The same user or their organization later creates an Enterprise tenant to:
• enable SSO federation,
• manage organization-wide policies,
• customize branding,
• centralize billing for the organization.

The current context (user vs. tenant) determines:

• which plan is relevant,
• which set of features and settings you see in the UI.