Enterprise

Sponsorship

Solvela is maintained by a small team. The hosted gateway at api.solvela.ai is free to use under the Business Source License 1.1 Additional Use Grant for any organization below USD $1M in attributable annual revenue, and free at any scale for first-party self-hosted deployments. Sponsorship covers the bills that make "free" possible.

Sponsorship is not a commercial license. If you're hosting the gateway as a managed service for third parties, or your annual revenue from the gateway exceeds $1M, you need a commercial license instead. Sponsorship is optional, ungated, and grants no exception to the BSL.

Where the money goes

Every dollar of sponsorship maps to a real recurring line item, not a salary. In rough order of cost:

Line item	What it covers
Solana RPC	Helius / Triton paid tier when free-tier limits are exceeded. Largest variable cost; scales with verified payments.
Gateway hosting	Fly.io app + autoscale headroom for the `api.solvela.ai` endpoint.
Cache + queue	Upstash Redis for x402 nonce store, idempotency keys, rate limits.
Frontend + docs	Vercel Pro tier for `solvela.ai` / `docs.solvela.ai` / `app.solvela.ai`.
Security	Quarterly `cargo-audit` / `cargo-deny` review; one external review per release of the Anchor escrow program.
Domains, certs, monitoring	Registrar fees, BetterUptime, Sentry hobby tier, log retention.

If sponsorship ever exceeds these line items, the surplus funds an external security audit of the gateway and escrow program. We will not pay maintainer salaries from sponsorship — that's what commercial licenses and the optional acquihire path are for. Sponsorship is for the lights.

Tiers

Tier	Monthly	What it covers	Perks
Supporter	$10	A week of Solana RPC quota under the public free-tier ceiling.	Listed in `BACKERS.md`; sponsor badge.
Operator	$50	A month of Fly.io dyno + Upstash Redis + Vercel hobby tier.	Listed in `BACKERS.md` and README; priority triage on issues you open; quarterly office-hours invitation.
Infrastructure	$250	A month of paid-tier RPC + monitoring + spare capacity for traffic bursts.	All Operator perks; logo on the homepage sponsors strip; direct Slack/Discord with the maintainer.
Underwriter	$1,000	Audit prep, contributor honoraria, and the kind of headroom that keeps the lights on without rent-seeking from users.	All Infrastructure perks; quarterly roadmap call; pre-publication notice on security advisories.

Custom tiers (annual prepay, multi-tier sponsorship, in-kind RPC credits) are welcome — email partnerships@solvela.ai.

Sponsorship versus commercial license

Use this table to figure out which one applies to you.

Your situation	What you actually want
Calling `api.solvela.ai` or self-hosting under $1M revenue	Optional sponsorship — keeps the public gateway online. No license action required.
Hosting the gateway as a managed service for third parties	Commercial license — BSL no-SaaS clause is triggered.
Annual revenue from the gateway exceeds $1M	Commercial license — BSL revenue cap is triggered.
Embedding any non-gateway crate (`solvela-protocol`, `solvela-x402`, `solvela-router`, `solvela-cli`) or any SDK	Nothing — MIT. Keep the standard notices.
You want to do all three	Commercial license covers it; optional additional sponsorship is welcome but not required.

Profiles in setup. GitHub Sponsors and Polar profiles for the solvela-ai org are not live yet. Until they are, email partnerships@solvela.ai with the tier you want to support and we'll send back payment instructions.

GitHub Sponsors (coming soon) — recurring billing, corporate-card-friendly, receipts handled by GitHub. Profile will live at github.com/sponsors/solvela-ai once enabled.
Polar.sh (coming soon) — one-time payments, crypto, alternative billing. Profile will live at polar.sh/solvela-ai once enabled.
Direct sponsorship (available today) — email partnerships@solvela.ai to wire / ACH / crypto-pay any of the listed tiers.
In-kind sponsorship (RPC credits, infra credits, security audit time) — email partnerships@solvela.ai with what you'd like to contribute.

Transparency

We publish quarterly:

Aggregate sponsorship received (rounded to $100)
Aggregate infra spend by line item
A line-item delta against the previous quarter

This lives at solvela.ai/metrics under the infra.spend panel once the first quarter of sponsorship clears. We do not publish individual sponsor amounts unless the sponsor requests it.

A note on philosophy

The maintainer of Solvela cannot personally support every production user. The Business Source License exists so that a single AWS-scale re-host of this code at zero attribution doesn't end the project's ability to fund itself. Sponsorship exists so that everyone below that threshold — hobbyists, indie devs, small AI startups, researchers — has a free, working gateway to point at while the project is small.