OSS vs Commercial at a glance
Farcaster is open-core. Everything you need to self-host, run, and secure the gateway is OSS — Apache-licensed, no call home, no usage cap. The line is drawn at money movement and multi-tenant convenience: OSS verifies and captures; Commercial collects, bills, and governs. See The open-core boundary for the reasoning behind where the line sits.
| Capability | Tier |
|---|---|
| Gateway, catalog, routing & proxy | OSS |
| MCP-native transport | OSS |
| Auth, SSRF guarding, per-tenant credential isolation | OSS |
| x402 payment gate (verify an authorization before forwarding) | OSS |
| Raw invocation & payment capture (via the API) | OSS |
Self-hosting a facilitator (the /settle server) |
OSS |
| Settlement / collection, fee modes, managed facilitator | Commercial |
| Usage & revenue metering dashboard, usage-based billing | Commercial |
| Multi-tenant control plane (centralized management, governance) | Commercial |
The short version: you can run Farcaster, catalog your agents, proxy their traffic, and verify a stablecoin payment before serving a paid call — entirely self-hosted, for free. The moment you want Farcaster to actually collect that payment on-chain, run it across a fleet of tenants from one control plane, or hand a finance team a billing dashboard, that’s the managed tier.
Pricing for the managed tier is not yet published — see Commercial for the current state.