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Tessera
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Pro & licensing

The open-core model — AGPLv3 core always free, a one-time Pro purchase verified offline with Ed25519, no subscription, no phone-home.

Tessera is open core. The complete local pipeline is free and open source under AGPLv3. Pro is a single one-time purchase that unlocks a small set of software capabilities. Pro sells software, never content — the uncensored core stays free.

What Free includes

The Free edition (AGPLv3) is the full local pipeline:

  • Semantic search and visual similarity
  • Auto-tagging and captions
  • Faces, places, and video scenes
  • 100% local, no telemetry
  • Self-hostable

You can run it, audit it, and self-host it with no license at all.

What Pro unlocks

Pro adds software capabilities, not content access:

  • Bulk export — filtered-set export pipelines.
  • Remote compute routing — point heavy jobs at your own remote compute.
  • Priority support.

Nothing in Pro gates a core capability. A missing or invalid license fails safe to the Free tier, with every core feature intact.

Pricing model

Pro is a single one-time purchase — there is no subscription and no recurring charge. The license is perpetual per major version: your purchase unlocks Pro for the current major version forever. A future major version is a separate, optional one-time purchase, and your installed version keeps working regardless. A newer major shows a gentle prompt, never a hard lockout.

Offline verification

License validation is fully offline. A Pro token is an Ed25519-signed claims payload, verified on-device against a public key baked into the app. The private signing key lives only with the issuer, never in the build.

Tessera never calls a server to verify your license, so Pro works on an air-gapped machine. The token is read from the MEDIA_PIPELINE_LICENSE environment variable or a license.key file in the project root.

An empty, unknown, malformed, forged, expired, or over-version token fails safe to the Free tier — it never bricks. An over-version token (one whose signed max_version is below the running major) simply downgrades to Free.

If you stop paying

There is nothing to stop. You buy Pro once. Your library and your app stay exactly where they are, on your machine, with no expiry.