Open substrate, charged operation
Compatibility is given away deliberately. The commercial surface is the institutional work that never stops changing.
No revenue exists. Every statement about willingness to pay on this page is an argument about structure, not an observation of behaviour.
What is actually sold
Nothing is charged for emitting evidence. The SDK, schema and verifier are openly licensed, because the wager is that cheap compatibility is what creates the corpus.
The charge is for crossing and for operating: maintained destination profiles, institutional workspaces, review operations, retained evidence histories, requirement changes, migrations and support. That is recurring work by nature, which is why it is the intended locus of recurring revenue.
Who pays first
The first payer is expected to be the party that carries consequence — a destination institution that must defend a decision, or a source company whose commercial relationship is blocked until evidence can cross. Not the party that merely finds the data interesting.
This ordering is a hypothesis. Until one arm's-length payer exists, the payer architecture on this site should be read as designed, not validated.
How the commercial motion is meant to start
Developer adoption of the free layer first; commercial conversion only when evidence becomes consequential. That avoids enterprise-sales dependency before the product can carry it, at the cost of a slower and less predictable revenue signal.
The honest risk is that free adoption never converts, because compatibility turns out to be valued at exactly what it costs: nothing.
What would show this is wrong
Destinations accept evidence but refuse to pay for its operation. Or sources integrate once and never reuse, which would mean the compatibility asset never compounds.
Either observation moves the commercial thesis from unproven to contradicted, and the claim register is where that would be recorded.