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Free vs Pro

FreeDocStore and ProDocStore are a free–pro pair in the Open Frontier store family. They are separate products, not one product with a feature gate — and the line between them is drawn by what the knowledge is, not by who publishes it.

Public knowledge is free to publish. Private knowledge is a business.

FreeDocStore — free for public knowledge, forever

Anyone can publish on FreeDocStore, including businesses. The constraint is on the knowledge, not the publisher:

  • the KB repo is public on GitHub
  • the content carries an open license
  • the published site is readable by everyone — humans and agents

That constraint is self-enforcing. Non-profits, community projects, standards, public-benefit registers, and open product docs all fit naturally. A business can absolutely use FreeDocStore — but only by giving its docs to the commons, which is exactly the trade the platform wants. There is no eligibility form, no policing of organization types, and no per-feature paywall on the free side.

What free includes:

  • unlimited public KBs under the Zensical contract
  • Cloudflare Pages hosting and deploys via GitHub Actions
  • AI-first editing (console, MCP update_files, Chrome extension) with your own OpenAI key (BYOK)
  • registry listing, search, and agent-readable source metadata

ProDocStore — business docs, paid

ProDocStore is for knowledge that cannot be public: internal handbooks, customer-only documentation, staff knowledge bases. It is the paid pair, priced per site/organization (subscription, in line with the store family's flat-fee model), and unlocks what public-first architecture cannot offer:

  • private repos with access-controlled hosting
  • SSO and per-KB roles (owner, editor, reviewer, viewer)
  • custom domains with automation
  • platform-provided AI editing quotas — no BYOK required
  • priority support and SLA
  • proprietary licensing — no open-license requirement

Why not "free for non-profits only"?

An eligibility-based split ("free if you're a non-profit") requires verifying who counts as a business, punishes edge cases (community interest companies, open-source startups), and turns away the platform's best growth channel: companies publishing public docs make the registry more useful and market the platform for free. Gating by public-vs-private achieves the same community outcome — public-benefit publishers ride free — without an enforcement apparatus.

Current status

FreeDocStore has no paid features and none are planned for it — the free side stays free. ProDocStore is in development as a separate product (ProDocStore-online org); its pricing and launch scope are not final. Billing surfaces in the FreeDocStore console are intentionally inert until then.