What a subscription for a Grid covers

The subscription for a configured Grid is one line on an agreement. It covers the Czar hardware installed in the building's rack, the platform license for the software that runs on it, and sustainment for the term. That sentence is short, so this article spends its length on what each part means for the people who run the floor, and on where the line stops.

The hardware

The hardware is the set of Czar nodes that make up the Grid, installed in the facility's own rack and joined into one pool. The number of nodes is set when the Grid is configured against the floor it will serve: the fleets on it, the models those robots need from the pool, and the latency each robot can tolerate before falling back to its own on-board model. Once configured, that is the Grid the subscription names.

Each node arrives sealed, with a sealed, signed, read-only software image. Before a node joins the Grid or accepts a task, it attests what it is running. Its integration, sealing, and software load are on record, so the site can answer where its hardware came from by reading a record. These properties are not options on top of the subscription. They are what a Czar is.

The platform license

The platform license covers Substrate and Agency Studio. Substrate is the serving system: inference across the pool, each robot's latency budget, memory, retrieval over the site's own documents, adaptation on the site's captures, evaluation and the record, integrity verification through Watchman, and governed connectivity through Local Bridge. Agency Studio is the task layer, where site tasks are authored, versioned, bounded, approved by named roles, and recorded for replay.

The license is for the Grid, not for a count of robots or users. A floor that adds a second vendor's mobile robots to the pool is using the same license. A floor that adds a named role in Agency Studio is using the same license. This matters for budgeting because the pool is meant to grow into the floor over time, and the license does not meter that growth. The Substrate page describes the serving system; the license simply covers all of it.

Sustainment

Sustainment is the part of the line that runs for the whole term. It includes signed updates to the software image, support through the customer portal, and remote sessions when the customer asks for them. It includes the attestation and provenance machinery that lets a node prove what it is running and where it came from.

The way sustainment is delivered follows the site's posture. On a connected site, the operator downloads signed update bundles from the portal and applies them when the floor allows. On an air-gapped site, the bundles are carried in by media, and the node verifies the signature before it accepts anything. In both cases the appliance never connects to the portal. Remote sessions are customer-initiated, and on a sovereign site an uplink window is only approved after the customer attests that data disks are detached, the network is isolated, the console is supervised, and the right authority has confirmed it. The window carries a hard expiry.

What the line does not include

The subscription does not include the robots. Mobile robots, pick arms, humanoids, cranes, and automated vehicles belong to their vendors and to the operator's agreements with those vendors. Their on-board models, their stops, their speed limits, and their reflexes stay with them. The Grid serves them; it does not replace them or their support arrangements.

The subscription also does not include the facility's own network or the systems the pool connects to. The warehouse system, the PLCs on a plant floor, and each vendor's fleet software are the site's, and the site decides which of them the Grid may reach. Local Bridge enforces those declarations, but the systems themselves are outside the line.

What the subscription does cover is the pool and everything needed to keep it attested, updated, and supported for the term. The How to buy page describes the two routes by which a site can hold it.