Licensing & commitments
Sondar is commercial software and we don't publish the engine's source. That removed the structural answer to 'what happens if you disappear or triple the price,' so the replacement has to be contractual — and published, because an unpublished commitment convinces nobody.
01
The price per vCPU for the units you already have will not rise by more than 5% at renewal.
Units you add are priced at the list price of the day and join the cap from their first renewal; buying more or fewer units changes your total, not your unit price. This is in the license agreement, not just on this page. It is cheap for us to give and it directly answers the fear that closed source creates — that once you are dependent, the number moves.
02
Any index can be archived to your own bucket or file share as gzipped JSON, readable without Sondar.
A file archive writes every event as one line of JSON, gzipped, to object storage or a shared file system you own — zcat and jq read it, and nothing about it needs us. Be clear about the other formats: snapshot archives and tiered index segments are Sondar's own index format, fast to restore and not readable without Sondar, so keep a file archive of anything you want independent of us. Your instrumentation is OpenTelemetry, so repointing it at another backend is a config change rather than a migration project. There is no rehydrate fee and no exit fee. This is the strongest answer we have on lock-in and it survives closed source intact.
03
Stated version-support windows, deprecation notice before removal, and no forced upgrade to keep your license valid.
The windows will be published against the first release line; none is published yet. An air-gapped install that never contacts us keeps working — license keys verify offline, and expiry warns rather than stops.
04
Once a year, on request, you confirm your vCPU count in writing. No auditor. No phone-home, ever.
There is no activation server and no usage telemetry, which means we genuinely cannot see your deployment. The trade is that compliance rests on the agreement rather than on a meter: you stay within the capacity you licensed, and if you grow past it you buy the extra at the then-current price. We would rather have that trade than contradict the air-gap claim.
Being precise about one word
The engine is proprietary. We don't publish its source, and we are not going to describe it as "source-available," "open-core," or any other phrasing that lets someone leave with the wrong impression. This audience punishes that imprecision harder than it punishes the license itself, and rightly.
What that costs you is real, so here is what we do instead: every release ships an SBOM and a signed manifest of its files, the product sends nothing to us, license keys verify offline, and any index can be archived to your bucket in a format that does not need us. We do not offer source escrow, and we have not commissioned a source code audit or a penetration test; we would rather say so here than let a dated promise stand in for one.
Against SigNoz and Coroot under Apache 2.0, and OpenObserve under AGPL, we are the only closed engine in the self-hosted tier. We would rather state that plainly and let you weigh it than have you discover it in a comment thread.
The end-user license agreement is not published yet. When it is, this page is the plain-language version of what it commits us to; where they disagree, the agreement governs and we have a bug on this page to fix.