The Hyperclay™ hosting software ships under the First Million Stays Yours License: MIT with one condition. This page is the whole program, and it is self-serve on purpose. No sales call, no negotiation, nobody to wait on.
free under this line. Below it you owe nothing and file nothing.
of covered revenue above the line. Marginal, like a tax bracket.
after each release, that version becomes plain MIT. Printed date, irrevocable.
Covered revenue: receipts from products and services you supply that contain this software, derive from it, or provide its functionality to others by running it. Where it is one component of something larger, only the share fairly attributable to it counts.
The fee only touches money the software itself brings in, so none of these owe anything, at any scale: internal use inside any organization, personal and nonprofit use, apps and sites built with ClayJS (a separate library, MIT-0 forever), installing or maintaining a customer's own copy (the license exempts that expressly), hosting your own organization's files, and anything you give away free. A business built on the software, a $2M consultancy or training company, owes nothing either: it is not selling the software.
And if you do sell hosting on our software but take in less than $1,000,000 a year of covered revenue: also nothing. No payment, no report, no registration, no contact with us, ever. You could run a $900k/year hosting business on our software and never once email us. We designed it that way.
Certification is earned by objective tests, never bought:
Certified hosts get the Certified Host badge and a listing in the host directory. Both launch with the program's first certifications. To be one of them, email license@hyperclay.com.
If your covered revenue passes $1M in a calendar year, once a year, within 90 days of year end:
Paying is the license: code rights at the published price, automatic. We can audit at most once a year, at our own expense, through an independent accountant. A good-faith mistake is a debt with a 30-day cure, never copyright infringement.
| You are | Covered revenue / year | You owe |
|---|---|---|
| A hobbyist | $0 | $0 |
| A solo host | $150,000 | $0 |
| An indie host | $2,000,000 | $30,000 (1.5% effective) |
| A funded competitor | $50,000,000 | $1.47M (2.94% effective) |
| A $10B company's internal pilot | $400,000 | $0 |
| A $2M training business built on Hyperclay | $0 (not selling the software) | $0 |
The exemption measures covered revenue, never company size. The first $1M is free for everyone, every year. And where our software is one component of a larger product, only the share fairly attributable to that component is covered, whether or not you price it separately.
Ask for a Coverage Certificate. Free, binding, in writing. Email license@hyperclay.com a complete and accurate description of your offering, plus your proposed allocation if our software is one component of a larger product or bundle.
We answer within 30 days with a binding determination of what is covered and what is not. If we fail to answer in 30 days, your description is accepted as submitted. Either way it binds us, and our successors, for the versions it names, as long as your facts stay as described.
The honest label: the fenced software is source available, not open source, and we will not blur that. It becomes open source, plain MIT, on the date printed in each release, per version, irrevocably. The page layer, ClayJS and the in-page libraries, is MIT-0 forever.
The binding text is the LICENSE in each repo; this page is the plain answers. The names are covered by the trademark policy. The file format is an open spec at malleablehtmlfile.com, and "malleable HTML" is a generic term that belongs to everyone.
Last updated: August 20, 2026