The open-core boundary

Farcaster is open-core. The one-line rule: OSS verifies and captures; Commercial collects, bills, and governs.

Why the line sits here

The gateway itself — catalog, routing, proxy, MCP-native transport, auth, SSRF guarding, per-tenant credential isolation — has to be free and self-hostable, or the sovereign/self-host pitch is hollow. The x402 payment gate (verifying a signed payment authorization before forwarding a call) is deliberately OSS too: it’s the primitive that makes “self-host and monetize” a credible claim, and giving it away seeds adoption. Raw invocation and payment data — what happened, when, for how much — is OSS as well; you own your own data, full stop.

What moves to Commercial is everything downstream of verification:

• Settlement / collection — actually submitting the verified payment on-chain, fee modes (passthrough, markup, absorb), and using Zerker’s managed facilitator instead of self-hosting one.
• The usage & revenue metering dashboard, and usage-based billing (quotas, invoicing, spend limits).
• The multi-tenant control plane — centralized management and governance across a fleet of tenants from one place.

This mirrors the clearest precedent in the space (Lunar’s MCPX, which gates even its usage-visibility dashboard behind its Enterprise tier): the free tier does real, load-bearing work — it isn’t a crippled trial — but the moment money actually moves, or you want centralized governance across many tenants, that’s the paid product.

Where you’ll see it marked

Any page describing a managed-only capability carries the same badge used above: Commercial. It shows up on facilitator collection, the metering dashboard, and the control plane — nowhere else. See OSS vs Commercial at a glance for the full table.