Plans & Limits

ALTCHA Sentinel is self-hosted software: you run it on your own infrastructure, and hosting is never part of the license. What a license does is lift capacity limits (instances, accounts, users) and unlock tier-gated features. This page goes deeper than the pricing page on exactly where those lines fall.

Trial

Sentinel runs on a 30-day trial automatically when no license key is configured — nothing to sign up for. The trial exists for evaluation, so it's deliberately constrained:

• Up to 3 instances — enough to test a clustered setup. See Clustering.
• A single account and a single user.
• Not for production traffic — the EULA restricts the trial to testing and evaluation.
• One trial per IP address within any 60-day window.

Every protection feature and every API is available during the trial — it's the capacity and the account/user model that are limited, not the detection capability.

Plan comparison

Enterprise Multi-Tenant is a separate arrangement for running one deployment across several organizations — including offering Sentinel-backed protection as a service to third parties. Contact us for terms.

Understanding the limits

Instances

An instance is one running Sentinel process (one container / pod). The limit is enforced per cluster, not across your whole estate — a separate staging cluster and a production cluster each get the full instance allowance. See Clustering.

Exceeding the licensed instance count doesn't fail immediately: the license server allows a grace period to absorb normal churn like pod rescheduling. Stay over the limit and the oldest instances beyond your allowance are shut down automatically. In a clustered deployment the license key must be set via the LICENSE_KEY environment variable — it can't be entered through the admin UI.

Accounts and users

• An account is a tenant boundary inside one Sentinel deployment — its own API keys, Security Groups, and settings. See Users & Accounts.
• A user is a person who signs in to the dashboard, with a role (Root, Admin, …) governing what they can do.

When you hit the account or user cap you simply can't create more until you upgrade — nothing already running is affected, unlike the instance limit.

Domains and verifications

There is no metering on either. Sentinel runs entirely on infrastructure you control, so there's no per-verification billing and no domain count to manage — every tier, including the trial, is unlimited here.

Feature gating

Detection and enforcement are identical across every tier — Adaptive Captcha, Threat Intelligence, the Classifier, Human Interaction Signature, Autopilot, Phishing Detection, Rate Limiters, the Email Spam Filter, and the full management API all work on the trial.

What a paid tier unlocks is operational scale and enterprise integration:

Database support by tier

The embedded SQLite default needs no configuration and is fine for evaluation or a single small instance. Any multi-replica deployment needs a networked main database plus a shared KV store — see Databases.

Support plans

Basic support — email, best-effort response — is included free with every license, including the trial. Paid support is a separate add-on that only changes your response-time SLA and channels; it never unlocks product features, and the tier you can buy depends on the license you hold.

Enterprise support engagements also include an integration review and periodic health checks. See the Support Policy for scope and definitions.

Choosing a plan

• Evaluating, or a single non-production instance — the trial covers it; no license needed.
• Production, one or a few instances, one team — Professional. Covers up to 3 instances, 10 accounts, 10 users, and every external database except MS SQL / Oracle / ClickHouse.
• Large or multi-team deployment, SSO, audit logs, OpenTelemetry, MS SQL / Oracle / ClickHouse, or unbounded instance count — Enterprise.
• Long-term deployment where a one-time cost beats a subscription — Enterprise Lifetime.
• One deployment serving multiple organizations, or reselling protection — Enterprise Multi-Tenant (contact us).

Related

• Pricing — current prices and the buy flow.
• License — configuring LICENSE_KEY, and offline (LICENSE_JSON) verification.
• Clustering — how the instance limit is enforced across replicas.
• Databases — the full backend matrix and connection setup.
• Users & Accounts — what accounts and users are, and roles.
• EULA and Support Policy — the binding terms.