Pricing details
Everything behind the two plans: how placements are counted, what common sizes cost, how billing works and what a support review includes.
v1.0-RC1 is available now — signed public bundle and images, installed with one command. What v1.0 means here: expected 1 January 2027, and it does not ship before at least two customers run Stella Ops in production and the public API surface is frozen.
What each plan includes
Free
- Up to 20 managed placements, production use included
- Unlimited environments, scans and deployments
- Every capability
- All software updates, vulnerability-intelligence updates and security fixes
- Offline operation, with evidence generated and verified locally
- Documentation and automated Doctor diagnostics
Maintained
- $0.50 per placement of subscribed capacity, per month
- Subscribe for a capacity at least equal to the placements you manage
- The $25 monthly minimum covers up to 50 placements
- Above 20, every placement counts — the free 20 are not deducted
- Every capability and every update, exactly as in Free
- No per-user, environment, setup, scan or evidence fees
You can order today: email sales@stella-ops.org with your installation and the placement capacity you need, and the order is placed through an authorised merchant of record. Online checkout is coming soon.
Capacity increases take effect when you order them and are prorated from that date; decreases take effect at renewal.
If you notice you have gone over your capacity, or over the free 20, by accident, you have 14 days from noticing to reduce usage or order capacity. This does not cover deliberate or repeated excess.
Updates cover the currently supported releases under the published support lifecycle, the same for Free and Maintained; earlier releases are not maintained indefinitely.
Prices are two fixed lists, in US dollars and in euros, with the same numbers. The page language only sets which one is shown; you choose the currency when you order.
Prices are shown excluding VAT. Any applicable VAT or sales tax is determined and charged at checkout by the merchant of record handling your order, based on your location and tax status.
Worked examples
| Managed placements | Plan | Per month | Equivalent annual cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Free | $0 | $0 |
| 20 | Free | $0 | $0 |
| 21 | Maintained | $25 | $300 |
| 30 | Maintained | $25 | $300 |
| 50 | Maintained | $25 | $300 |
| 51 | Maintained | $25.50 | $306 |
| 75 | Maintained | $37.50 | $450 |
| 100 | Maintained | $50 | $600 |
| 200 | Maintained | $100 | $1,200 |
| 360 | Maintained | $180 | $2,160 |
| 1,000 | Maintained | $500 | $6,000 |
Equivalent annual cost is 12 × the monthly price, shown for budgeting. It is not a separate annual plan.
What counts as a managed placement
A managed placement is one managed workload in one environment of your installation. A workload counts whether Stella Ops deploys it or gates or promotes a release that another tool deploys — a container service, or a digest-addressed artifact deployed to a host over SSH or WinRM; both count the same.
For counting, a workload is identified in an environment by the container image digests Stella Ops sees there: its own deployments, a node (target) you register or edit that runs the workload, and vulnerability scans of an image installed there. Scanning an image that runs in none of your environments never creates a placement, and scanning the same image again never adds one.
Examples
- One workload in dev, staging and production: 3 placements
- Ten workloads in three environments: 30 placements
- A workload another tool deploys and Stella Ops gates: 1 placement per environment
- Five replicas of one workload in one environment: 1 placement
- Restarting a workload: no additional placement
- A new image version of the same workload: no additional placement
- Scanning the same image again: no additional placement
- Scanning an image that runs in none of your environments: no placement
- More vulnerability reports: no additional placement
- Stella Ops' own infrastructure: not counted
Placements are counted per installation — one logical control-plane deployment of Stella Ops. Cluster nodes, database replicas and failover components of the same deployment count together; independently operated installations are separate. Environments are never priced.
A placement ends when Stella Ops stops managing that workload in that environment. Keeping its historical evidence does not keep it counted.
The current release shows no placement total, so count them yourself: each workload in each environment that Stella Ops deploys, gates or promotes. The Estate view lists the deployments Stella Ops ran; add the workloads that other tools deploy and Stella Ops gates. How the Estate view works
One product. Every capability. Simple pricing.
Free and Maintained run the same build. The plan sets how many placements you may run in production, never what the product can do.
- Promotion workflows with approvals and policy gates
- Reachability-aware vulnerability triage
- SBOM and VEX handling
- Signed, replayable Decision Capsules
- Deployment to Docker Compose and to SSH and WinRM hosts
- Estate view with continuous drift watch
- NIS2, DORA and CRA evidence packs — they collect evidence, they do not certify compliance
- Regional cryptography profiles
- Offline and air-gapped operation
- Doctor self-diagnostics
There is no fee per scan or per deployment, and scanning the same image again never adds a placement.
Offline installations take vulnerability-intelligence updates through the Offline Kit, and feed age is reported per source, on screen.
Need an engineer? $75 per review.
One review covers one defined issue. An engineer analyses what you send and replies in writing with the likely cause and the corrective or diagnostic steps we recommend.
A review does not include unlimited engineering hours, custom development, guaranteed remediation or ongoing consultancy, and it carries no ongoing service level.
Before you buy, we give you an estimated delivery window. Once we have the information we need, we reply in writing within a reasonable time, and before we ask for logs we tell you how to send diagnostic data securely.
If the review shows that the main issue is a reproducible defect in a supported, correctly configured release, the fee is refunded — or credited, if you prefer.
Documentation, Doctor diagnostics and self-service troubleshooting are free for everyone.
Reporting a product defect or a security vulnerability never requires a paid review: report defects through the community forge and vulnerabilities to security@stella-ops.org.
To buy a review, email support@stella-ops.org with a short description of the issue.
You are never blocked waiting for us: a scoped, time-limited gate exception and Doctor's non-destructive fixes let you restore releases yourself.
Self-hosted, and still yours offline
- Your workloads, artifacts and evidence stay on your infrastructure. Routine scanning and deploying need no Stella Ops cloud service.
- The current release does not enforce the placement limit and does not check a licence, so nothing is switched off when a subscription ends. Paid capacity is licensed for the subscription term; after it, production use above 20 placements needs a renewal or a reduction to 20.
- Evidence your installation has generated stays verifiable with your installation's own trust root, with or without a subscription.
- The signed release bundle and the images download anonymously — no account, no token.
Signed releases and independently verifiable evidence
Stella Ops release bundles and container images are signed with Cosign, and the public key is published on the verification keys page. The bundle signature verifies offline.
Evidence your installation generates is signed with your installation's own keys, not ours, and verifies offline against the trust root you declare: stella evidence verify-offline <bundle.tgz> --trust-root <keys.jwks.json|key.pem>.
The two answer different questions: a release signature shows that a bundle came from Stella Ops; an evidence signature shows that a record came from your installation.
Questions about pricing
- What is a managed placement?
- Do replicas, restarts or new versions add placements?
- Is one workload in three environments one placement or three?
- Do scans or deployments cost extra?
- What happens above 20 placements?
- Why does the first paid month cost $25?
- What happens if my subscription ends?
- Does an offline installation need to contact Stella Ops to stay licensed?
- How is my paid capacity recorded?
- How can I verify Stella Ops evidence?
- Can AI agents, automation and other scanners work with Stella Ops?
- What does a $75 support review include?
Who you buy from: Paid Stella Ops plans are sold through authorised resellers acting as merchants of record. The merchant of record for your order is the contracting seller for order processing, payment, applicable taxes, invoicing, chargebacks and transactional refunds under its Buyer Terms and Privacy Notice. Legal notice
Go deeper
Pricing and licensing FAQ All capabilities Deployment targets and operations Decision Capsules and replay NIS2 · DORA · CRA packs Regional cryptography Licence and free-tier terms Vendor security review