Subscriptions & Memberships

What you’ll get here

a clear mental model of how Smart Engines decides who can call the platform, how much they can call it, and what proves they paid — and where to go next for each piece.

A platform that gives away unbounded compute and chain operations doesn’t survive. So Smart Engines puts a single, honest gate in front of access: a subscription. You pick a tier, you lock a deposit in HSUITE at a price-locked quote (the HSUITE/USD rate is fixed when you request, so the amount you owe doesn’t drift while you pay), the cluster mints you an on-chain subscription NFT, and from then on every request is checked against your tier’s quota before any work happens.

Nothing here is hidden in a billing database you can’t see. Your subscription has an on-chain receipt, your quota is enforced at the edge, and the cluster watches the clock: you renew with hsuite renew before the lock lapses.

🧠 For Normies

A subscription is your paid plan. A membership is the same idea applied to infrastructure operators (the hosts that run the network). Both answer one question: “are you allowed to do this, and how much of it?” The proof you paid isn’t a row in a spreadsheet — it’s an NFT in your wallet.

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The model in one diagram

flowchart TD
    Dev["Developer / Smart App"] -->|"choose tier"| Req["POST /api/v3/subscription/request"]
    Req -->|"any tier (all paid)"| Pending["PENDING_DEPOSIT<br/>(deposit wallet created)"]
    Pending -->|"HSUITE deposit confirmed"| Confirmed["DEPOSIT_CONFIRMED"]
    Confirmed -->|"mint subscription NFT (XRPL)"| Active
    Active -->|"every API call"| Gate{"Tier quota check"}
    Gate -->|"within quota"| Work["Request served + metered"]
    Gate -->|"over quota"| Reject["429 / blocked"]
    Active -->|"renew (hsuite renew)"| Active
    Active -->|"lock lapses / NFT leaves wallet"| Expired["EXPIRED"]

The subscription NFT lives on XRPL — the canonical ledger for the HSUITE ecosystem. Tier and quota state live in the cluster’s record for your app; the NFT is the on-chain proof that the subscription exists and belongs to you.

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Page index

Model & tiersHow subscriptions work end-to-end, and the four real tiers (builder, growth, scale, enterprise) with their per-service allowances.

NFT membershipsThe XRPL subscription NFT — how it's minted by threshold multisig, what its URI encodes, and how it maps to access.

Gating & quotasHow a subscription enforces capability limits and daily quotas, and how that ties into metering.

Renewal lifecycleThe full lifecycle — subscribe → active → renewal → top-up → upgrade/downgrade → lapse/expire.

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How the pieces fit

Tiers

Define the rules: a monthly USD price plus per-service monthly allowances (validator txns/signs/entities, host storage/db-ops/fn-invocations/app slots, gateway bandwidth/domains, Harbor repos, smart-agent budget), plus declared networks and feature flags.

The NFT

The on-chain receipt that you hold a subscription, issued on XRPL and signed by the validators’ threshold multisig, never a single key.

Gating

Reads your tier on every request and refuses anything outside your quota or your tier’s capability limits.

Renewal

You renew with hsuite renew; renewal, upgrades, downgrades, and same-tier float top-ups all flow through the same deposit-backed machinery. A drained prepaid balance can be re-funded in place (hsuite topup) without changing tier — see Renewal lifecycle.

🧠 For Normies

Think of a stadium: the tier is the kind of ticket, the NFT is the wristband on your arm, the gate is the usher checking it at every door, and renewal is how you keep your wristband valid for next season.

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Next steps

New here? Start with Model & tiers

NFT membershipsWant to understand the on-chain proof?

Gating & quotasBuilding against the quota? How a subscription gates features and enforces daily quotas.

Metering & consumptionThe host-side metering & consumption that quota ties into.

TokenomicsCurious how HSUITE flows?

GlossaryUnsure on a term? The Glossary keeps plain-English definitions.