The Record Is Free Forever
GaaS's standing pledge about the audit record — what it covers, exactly, and how we hold ourselves to it.
What this covers, precisely
| Guarantee | What it means |
|---|---|
| Record creation | Every governance decision — approve, block, modify, or escalate, in live or shadow mode — produces a hash-chained audit record, on every tier including Free. |
| Export | Bulk and streaming audit export (GET /v1/audit/export, GET /v1/audit/export/stream) never requires a paid plan. |
| Cryptographic verification | Hash-chain integrity checks (GET /v1/audit/chain/verify), signed decision proof tokens (GET /v1/verify/proof/{token_id}), and offline verification bundles never require a paid plan. |
| Appeal & contest | Appealing a blocked decision and contesting a record never require a paid plan. |
| Immutability | Records are SHA-256 hash-chained and cryptographically signed. No future change will weaken these guarantees — strengthening (e.g. optional ledger anchoring) only. |
What this does not cover
Being precise is part of keeping a promise, so here is the boundary:
- Retention length varies by plan — per the published schedule on Billing & Quotas (7 days on Free up to 7 years on Enterprise). Within your retention window, access, export, and verification are always free. Export before expiry if you need the record longer than your window.
- Verification bundles outlive retention — an exported verification bundle remains independently verifiable offline, forever, without a GaaS account.
- Enforcement is a separate, paid capability — preventive control (the inline gate) is what paid plans buy. The record of what happened is not.
- Decision volume is subject to plan quotas — quotas limit how many governance decisions you can submit, not your access to the records of decisions already made.
How we hold ourselves to it
This pledge is enforced in code, not just posted on a page. Our continuous integration suite walks the API's full route table on every change and fails the build if any audit, verification, appeal, or contest endpoint carries a paid-plan gate. A change that violates this pledge cannot merge.
/v1/audit and /v1/verify endpoints.
Why we pledge this
An audit record that can be paywalled is leverage; a record that can be quietly weakened is worthless. Governance only works if the evidence layer is beyond commercial reach — including ours. The free record is how an agent, its operator, a buyer, an auditor, or a regulator can all look at the same history and agree on what happened.
Related Pages
- Billing & Quotas — Plans, quotas, and the retention schedule
- Compliance — Framework mappings and evidence endpoints
- API Reference — Complete endpoint documentation
- Shadow Mode — Free governance observation, no card required