ns-brain is free: the whole kernel at full strength for one developer on any number of projects. What you pay for is us running it and sharing it securely: one brain on every machine you use, or one brain for your whole team.
| 1 person | $9.99/mo, billed yearly |
| up to 20 people | $99/mo |
| up to 50 people | $199/mo |
| up to 200 people | $499/mo |
Signing up is self-serve. The first six months are on us and need no card.
What you getHive is priced per company rather than per seat, on purpose: $9.99 a month billed yearly ($119.88) for one person, then $99 a month up to twenty people, $199 up to fifty and $499 up to two hundred. Adding a person should never be a decision anybody has to think about. Storing more and recalling more never costs more either, because a meter teaches people to stop recalling before they search and stop writing before the session ends. Fair-use caps notify; they do not charge. Signing up is self-serve. The first six months are on us and need no card.
| ns-brain | Hive | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | 1 person: $9.99/mo billed yearly to 20 people: $99/mo to 50: $199/mo to 200: $499/mo | Quoted |
| Projects | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
| Machines | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
| Ranking, decay, supersession, provenance, guards | full | full | full |
| MCP, nearly every command as a tool | yes | yes | yes |
| Session hooks and auto-recall | yes | yes | yes |
| Full export, no lock-in | yes | yes | yes |
| Reaching one brain from several machines | no, each machine has its own | yes | yes |
| Writes survive the server being unreachable | n/a, it is local | queued, in order | queued, in order |
| People per brain | 1 | up to 200 | unlimited |
| Roles, attribution, org axioms | no | yes | yes |
| Encryption at rest | no, deliberately | per-org key | per-org key, your master key |
| Who holds the key | you | us, in a separate key service | you |
| Web UI | in the binary: read, tree, forget | the binary's own, plus a hosted dashboard for people, approvals, credentials, billing, export | the same, on your own server |
| Retention, legal hold, erasure | no | yes | yes |
| Standard DPA | n/a | included | yours if you prefer |
| SSO through your identity provider | n/a | not built | not built |
| Who runs the server and the backups | you | us | you |
The DPA is included at the cheapest paid tier rather than held back. Under GDPR it is table stakes for anyone with EU customers and a paid tier you cannot legally buy from Ireland is not a tier.
Ranking, decay tiers, supersession, provenance, the guards, local MCP and full export ship in ns-brain at full strength. Not a trial of them. Not a subset. A price multiple should buy a different thing, not the same thing with permissions.
Encryption at rest is missing from the free edition on purpose. One developer keeping their own data on their own machine has no second party to be protected from and full-disk encryption on your laptop is the right layer for that job. The moment somebody else's reasoning is in the store, the argument changes and that is where the paid key hierarchy starts.
Export is complete and free in both directions. ns-brain export gives you every memory, event, supersession link and provenance field as one JSON file and import reads it back, remapping the ids that do not survive a round trip. Nothing about paying makes your data harder to take somewhere else.
Start free on your machine and move to Hive when you want one brain on every machine or a team on the same brain. That is the intended path rather than a fallback.
It is the whole product for one developer and it stays free whatever happens to the rest of this.