It’s the third of the month and your phone buzzes. Some app you forgot you subscribed to just auto-charged $14.99, and a SaaS you actually liked emailed to announce the free tier is now “Starter (Legacy)” — your price up 40%, grandfathered nobody, framed like it was somehow your fault for still being here. You stare at the bank notification and feel your soul lowkey leave your body. Yeah. We hate that too.
So here is the whole business model, and it fits in two lines.
Sanctum
Free. All of it.
Not a trial. Not a crippled tier. Not free-for-now.
Holocron
$9.99 once
The native app for the haus — the one you actually keep on your dock.
Sanctum runs on your hardware. Every computation happens on your Mac Mini — not our servers. That is not a pricing gimmick; it is the whole shape of the product.
Which means our cost to serve you is $0.00. There is no per-user infrastructure bill creeping up behind the scenes, no investor asking why the free users have not converted yet, no quarterly meeting where someone suggests moving multi-site “up into Pro.” We physically cannot degrade your experience from here. We would have to break into your haus, and that seems like a lot of effort for a software company.
The usual reason free tiers rot is that they cost the vendor money. This one does not.
You bring your own key.
Sanctum talks to Anthropic, OpenRouter, Gemini and friends through a local proxy that meters every request at the raw provider price. You pay the provider directly, at their price, with no broker in the middle taking a cut for the privilege of forwarding your tokens. Most haus work never leaves the building anyway — the local models handle it, and the proxy only escalates when a request genuinely needs a bigger brain.
Requests bound for external providers pass through a PII anonymization layer first: names, emails and phone numbers scrubbed on the way out, restored on the way back. To everyone upstream you are a ghost who asks very specific questions about YAML configuration.
So the free thing — what is the catch? There isn’t one, and we are aware that sounds exactly like what someone with a catch would say. The check is structural, not a promise: read what runs where. Our servers are not in the path. A company cannot ransom what it never holds.
What do I actually get for $9.99? A native app instead of a browser tab. If you are happy in a browser, you genuinely do not need it, and we are not going to nag you about it from a banner. Ten dollars, once, is roughly what the other guys charge you every month to hold your own thermostat hostage.
Will you add subscriptions later? That is the promise this page exists to make: no. The moment there is recurring revenue, there is pressure to justify it, and the honest way to do that is to hold something back. We would rather ship an app good enough that buying it once feels fair.
What happens to my haus if you disappear? It keeps running. That is not a courtesy, it is the architecture — everything already executes on your hardware, and the config is yours in plain YAML. A dead vendor is an inconvenience, not an outage.
Do you sell my data? No. We never have your data. Everything runs on your hardware, kept in a very short ledger. If we wanted your data we would not have built a platform specifically designed to keep it away from us.
Tommy, the haus’s late Abyssinian and its most honest auditor, would have approved of a ledger this short. He spent fifteen years confirming that the best things in a haus — the warm flagstone, the south-facing sill, the specific corner of the duvet — cost nothing and belong to whoever shows up. Sanctum is built the same way. Run it on your own hardware, and the only charge that ever lands on the third of the month is the one you already decided to make, once.
