Licensing

This page describes licensing on the LyftData 3.0.0 beta track. Community Edition runs without a license; it is ideal for evaluation and small deployments. Licensed editions carry signed entitlement claims for volume, Workers, and feature grants.

Volume entitlements on this page use decimal units: 1 GB is 10⁹ bytes and 1 TB is 10¹² bytes.

Community Edition limits

• One built-in Worker (external Workers require a license)
• Up to 15 jobs across the workspace
• A local rate limiter at approximately 250 GB/day
• MCP is included
• Licensed-only connectors and features remain unavailable in Community Edition

Use this guide when you are ready to activate a license so you can add external Workers, remove the Community limits, and unlock licensed-only features.

Editions

Edition	License	Volume entitlement	Worker entitlement	Product features
Community Edition	No license required	250 GB/day, applied by the local rate limiter	One built-in Worker	Community feature set, at most 15 jobs, MCP included
Community+	Licensed; no charge; renewed annually	1 TB/day, observed with no product rate limiter	One Worker	All generally available self-managed features
Standard Edition	Paid — contact the LyftData team	From 1 TB/day, scaling by committed TB/day	No licensed Worker limit	All generally available self-managed features
Enterprise Edition	Paid and negotiated — contact the LyftData team	No licensed throughput limit	No licensed Worker limit	All generally available self-managed features

“No licensed limit” and “all generally available self-managed features” describe the commercial software entitlement. They do not promise unlimited technical capacity or unsupported topologies — capacity remains bounded by the infrastructure you deploy and the architecture LyftData supports. Hosted or managed services, professional services, and support packages are contracted separately and are not product-feature gates.

Community+ is the registration and activation step between anonymous Community use and paid Standard use. Activating Community+ removes the Community rate limiter and the 15-job maximum, and neither is re-enabled afterwards. Standard conversion is the next step when a deployment needs more than one Worker, more than 1 TB/day, or a commercial procurement relationship. Enterprise is not a further feature-unlock step; it is the negotiated edition with no commercial ceiling.

Observe and assist

On licensed editions — Community+, Standard, and Enterprise — LyftData observes usage to produce evidence, rather than enforcing entitlements inside the product.

• Commercial non-compliance never stops, throttles, disables, undeploys, or otherwise interrupts your operations. Already-running and newly requested workflows, jobs, deployments, and Workers keep working.
• Usage above your entitlement is recorded as evidence and, where it meets the applicable review conditions, leads to an assistive true-up conversation handled contractually.
• Community Edition’s rate limiter and 15-job maximum are boundaries of the unlicensed edition, not licensed-edition enforcement. Activating Community+ removes both.
• Missing or stale usage evidence is shown as missing or stale; it is not converted into an assumed compliance result.

Security trust and resource safety are separate and unchanged. A forged or cryptographically invalid license, an explicit security revocation, bounded backpressure, and resource-exhaustion protection are not commercial metering actions.

Requesting a license

Request an evaluation license via email using the license request form, or use the Portal checkout flow where beta access has been enabled for your account.

Evaluation license limits

Evaluation licenses are time-limited and include a daily processing volume cap and a Worker limit. The exact limits depend on your evaluation program; after activation, check Settings → License for the values shown in your License Summary.

For production or higher-throughput deployments, contact us to review the Standard and Enterprise editions.

Configuring a server license

To configure a license on a LyftData server, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to the UI as admin using the one-time password from the server log.
2. Open the main navigation menu and choose Settings → License.
3. Click Change license, paste your key, and select Activate.

Alternative: provide license via environment variable

You can provide a license non-interactively on server startup using the LYFTDATA_LICENSE environment variable. This is useful for automation:

# example: systemd EnvironmentFile or shell export before starting
export LYFTDATA_LICENSE="<paste-your-license-jwt>"

• When set, the server uses this value as a bootstrap license at startup.
• If no license exists yet, it is applied automatically.
• If an existing stored license is invalid, the bootstrap license is used to replace it.
• If a valid stored license already exists, release builds keep the existing license.
• For first-run automation, you can also accept the EULA via LYFTDATA_LICENSE_EULA_ACCEPT=yes.

See also: Configuration for details on these environment variables.

License expiry and early warnings

Worker authorization leases are always capped at your license expiry, so an expiring license eventually stops external workers. Since v2.0.8 the product warns you ahead of time:

• The server logs a warning 14 days before license expiry and again 3 days before.
• The license health badge in the header and Settings → License apply warning styling at the same thresholds.
• Workers log a local warning when their authorization lease approaches those thresholds.
• Community Edition never warns — it does not expire.

Renew and activate the new license before expiry; workers pick up new leases automatically and jobs continue without interruption. If the license does expire, activating a valid license recovers external workers automatically within a few minutes — no worker restart is needed.

Reverting to Community Edition

Two supported paths remove a configured license and return the server to Community Edition:

• lyftdata license clear — authenticated CLI, applies immediately.
• The --clear-license server startup flag — clears the stored license during startup.

External workers stop being authorized once the server is in Community Edition (only the built-in worker remains available), and the Community rate limiter and 15-job maximum apply again. If you later activate a license again, external workers recover automatically within a few minutes.

Remove --clear-license after use

Remove --clear-license from your service unit or startup command once the intended clear has happened — in particular before activating a new license. Since v2.0.8 the flag is one-shot: it clears at most once and a stale flag logs a loud warning instead of wiping a license activated later. On releases before v2.0.8 a forgotten flag silently deletes the stored license on every restart.