Upgrade Guide — Free to Team

Last updated: 2026-07-22
Version: v1.7.0
Audience: Free users who want Team tier (governance, audit, seats)

Why upgrade?

The MIT core is free forever — 12-50x token reduction, synapse learning, MCP server, 10 languages. You do NOT upgrade for more savings.

You upgrade for:

• Governance — control what AI agents can publish/shared memory
• Audit log — SHA-256 hash-chained, append-only, exportable
• Seat management — add/remove engineers, soft-delete, idempotent
• Self-hosted deployment — air-gapped, docker-compose, data persists

Price: $29/user/mo, annual contract, 5-50 seats.

Upgrade flow (5 minutes)

Step 1: Verify you’re on free tier

neuralmind team license status

Output should show: tier: free, seats: 1, expires: never.

If you see tier: team already — you’re done.

Step 2: Run onboarding

neuralmind onboarding

Walks through:

1. License activation (or keep free tier)
2. Governance defaults (scope, weight threshold)
3. Admin email setup
4. Team seat audit
5. Verification

For defaults-only: neuralmind onboarding --quick

Step 3: Activate Team license

Purchase a Team license key (.json file), then:

neuralmind team license activate <path-to-license.json>

The license is Ed25519-signed with 30-day offline grace. If you’re air-gapped, the license keeps working for 30 days without phoning home.

Step 4: Verify

neuralmind team license status

Output should now show: tier: team, seats: N, expires: <date>.

Step 5: Add seats

neuralmind team seats add <employee1@company.com>
neuralmind team seats add <employee2@company.com>

Seats are idempotent — adding an existing seat errors softly.

Downgrade flow

There’s no downgrade guard. If you stop paying:

1. License expires at end of annual term
2. Commands still work (grace period applies)
3. neuralmind license status shows EXPIRED
4. Free tier auto-reactivates — neuralmind wakeup . re-issues free license

No data loss. The MIT core doesn’t check license status.

What the upgrade CTA looks like

After 10 wakeup/query calls, the CLI prints:

NeuralMind Team: $29/user/mo — shared memory, governance, seat management.
See neuralmind.uk/pricing or run `neuralmind onboarding`.

This fires exactly once. To re-trigger: neuralmind onboarding directly.

Honest scope (what does NOT change on upgrade)

You are paying for compliance, not compression.

Troubleshooting

Wiki v1.0. Next review: after Enterprise tier ships.