Base substrate

The Base substrate is the open-core floor every Caisson bundle composes on. It is Apache-2.0, installs without a license, and carries the load-bearing contracts, the typed error hierarchy, fail-closed tenancy, the billing port, the token floor, that the commercial modules extend but never fork.

What's in the base

• kernel: the typed CaissonError hierarchy, the credit-gate and tenancy-denial error shapes, and the one standards gate every package ships through.
• auth: self-hosted better-auth that owns its Drizzle tables, with an EdDSA-signed JWT and a JWKS cross-plane seam.
• tenancy-rls: fail-closed multi-tenant Postgres RLS: a query with no tenant context returns nothing.
• billing: Stripe, Paddle, LemonSqueezy, and Polar behind a BillingProvider port, with HMAC raw-body webhook verification.
• ai-config: provider-agnostic AI configuration with agent-assisted setup.
• mcp-server: the buyer-facing MCP server, auth-gated and entitlement-scoped.
• ui: a typed token floor: --cs-* OKLCH tokens, one light and one dark theme.
• jobs: a Trigger.dev job port with test drivers; billing and credit side-effects are enqueued, not inline.
• email: a Resend email port with a test driver.
• registry-schema: the open module-manifest and index schema plus the allowlist helpers — the contract the commercial registry service implements.
• observability: a vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry bootstrap; env-gated NodeSDK with an OTLP/HTTP exporter.
• rate-limit: token-bucket rate limiting with per-key and global ceilings and an injectable clock.
• ds-manifest: the design-system contracts an agent reasons over — the component-manifest schema, its typed reader, and the pure contrast and static-usage checkers.

The generator and its tooling, create-caisson, the CLI, @caisson/migrate, and license-verify: are part of the same open set; start at create-caisson.

That is the whole open set: sixteen Apache-2.0 packages, thirteen substrate plus three generator tooling. Nothing else in the catalog is Apache-2.0.

The Platform tier

Three commercial modules extend the base without living in a persona bundle:

• org-controls: WorkOS SSO, the owner-gated multi-user surface, and the admin-write RLS layer.
• billing-orchestration: the full verify → parse → checkout → idempotency flow composed on the open BillingProvider port.
• ui-pro: the commercial component tier on the open @caisson/ui token floor: DataTablePro, OpsMatrix, AuditTimeline, CommandPalette, charts, and the interactive primitives.

Licensing

The base packages are Apache-2.0 and never depend "up" on a commercial module. The Platform tier is commercial (LicenseRef-Caisson-Commercial) and requires a valid Caisson entitlement to install from the registry, the same model as every bundle module.