Self-serve until it isn't.
Then Enterprise.
Lucairn's self-serve tiers (Developer and Pro) ship the same protocol Enterprise does — same Ed25519 signature, same Rekor anchor, same receipt schema. What differs is everything around the protocol: where it deploys, who holds the keys, whether the PII shield is generic or trained on your data, and what the contract says when an auditor asks. This page is the line between the two paths.
Self-serve is right when you ship under audit but the audit is generic. Enterprise is right when any of these apply: customer-held witness keys are non-negotiable, you need air-gapped or sovereign deployment, your data has industry-specific identifiers a generic PII shield misses, you need NIS 2 framework support, more than one developer needs access, or your procurement team needs a bespoke DPA. Enterprise gets a custom-trained PII shield (priced per scope), a self-hosted runtime, and a dedicated solutions architect — not a different protocol.
Same protocol.
Different surface area.
Every tier produces identical receipts — same Ed25519 signature, same Sigstore Rekor anchor. What differs is everything around the protocol: where it deploys, who holds the keys, whether the PII shield is generic or trained on your data, and what your DPA says.
Developer (Free)
Self-serve sign-up. 500 receipts / month, BYOK to your LLM provider, on-gateway pseudonymisation before your LLM sees the request, public Rekor anchoring. 30-day retention. Single developer; community support.
Right for evaluation, side projects, and engineering observability. Not enough for regulator-graded production.
Pro (waitlist)
50,000 receipts / month, audit-log export, Lucairn Certificates, P7Y retention. Same Ed25519 + Sigstore Rekor stack as Enterprise. SaaS-shaped: Lucairn operates the runtime; on-gateway pseudonymisation before your LLM sees the request; witness keys are Lucairn-managed.
Right for solo developers and consultants shipping under audit, when EU-region SaaS is acceptable to procurement.
Enterprise
Self-hosted gateway, bridge, and witness in your environment — no raw identity data leaves your environment. Customer-held witness keys (BYO HSM). Custom-trained PII shield on your de-identified domain corpus, priced per scope. Air-gapped Rekor mirror option. Bespoke sanitiser ruleset, custom entity types, dedicated solutions architect. Licensed per active workflow vertical; custom features available at additional scope.
Right when procurement, regulator, or industry data forces customer-held cryptographic claims, sovereign deployment, or industry-specific PII detection.
Fifteen criteria,
three tiers.
The criteria below are the ones procurement, security, and compliance teams actually push on. The Enterprise column is honest about what it adds, not just “more of the same.”
Ten capabilities
Pro doesn’t have.
These aren’t “more receipts” or “longer retention” — those are quantitative differences in the comparison table above. These are categorically different deliverables that come with the Enterprise engagement motion.
Custom-trained PII shield
The level-3 PII shield model fine-tuned on your de-identified domain corpus — medical record numbers, internal account formats, case classifications, industry-specific identifiers a generic matcher misses. Training runs in your environment on dedicated GPU; training data never leaves your environment. Priced per scope as part of the Enterprise engagement.
Custom Presidio entity types
Extend the standard PII recognisers (PERSON, IBAN, PHONE) with entity types specific to your industry: NHS_NUMBER, MEDICAL_RECORD_NUMBER, SWIFT_CODE, INTERNAL_CASE_ID, BUNDESBANK_LEI. Defined during the assessment based on your real data shape.
Bespoke sanitiser ruleset
Deployment-scoped configuration tuned per workflow: which entity types are blocked, which are pseudonymised, which are passed through with k-anonymity generalisation. Different rulesets per workflow are supported (e.g. clinical-notes vs claims-handling).
Self-hosted runtime
Lucairn deploys in your environment — on-prem, VPC, sovereign cloud (Bundescloud, OVHcloud, T-Systems), or fully air-gapped. Helm umbrella chart with subcharts. Customer-operated; Lucairn provides the architecture spec, deployment manifest, and quarterly review. No raw identity data leaves your environment.
Customer-held witness keys (BYO HSM)
The witness key — the only key that produces valid receipts — is generated in your HSM (YubiHSM, AWS CloudHSM, Azure Dedicated HSM, any PKCS#11) and never leaves it. Lucairn cannot produce a valid signature against your published witness public key. Even a runtime compromise cannot forge receipts.
Air-gapped Rekor mirror
For deployments that cannot anchor in the public Sigstore Rekor (sovereign cloud, classified workloads, air-gap), Lucairn supports running an internal Rekor instance. Trade-off: auditors verify against your log instead of the public one. Most regulated customers run with both: public log for external auditors, internal mirror for offline procurement reviews.
NIS 2 framework support
Currently Enterprise-only. The NIS 2 evidence-pack template requires a private Rekor mirror (per Art 24 European certification scoping) and customer-held witness keys (per Art 21 risk management) — both Enterprise capabilities. Self-serve tiers cannot claim NIS 2 controls in their compliance_trace.
Bespoke compliance addenda
Customer-specific DPA, sub-processor manifest, exit terms, breach-notification window, and any framework addenda your legal team requires. Pro ships with a standard DPA; Enterprise negotiates.
Per-vertical licensing
Enterprise is licensed by active workflow vertical — ITSM, HR/HRSD, GRC, Customer Service, and your industry-specific workflows. One vertical is the base; each additional vertical stacks on top of the licence. Lets you start with the workflow that matters most and expand without renegotiating the whole contract.
Solutions architect + quarterly review
Named technical contact on call during business hours. Quarterly review of receipt chain integrity, anchoring health, sanitiser performance, and upcoming framework changes (DORA enforcement, EU AI Act high-risk classification, etc.).
Three signals,
three answers.
If we said “always Enterprise,” we’d be selling. The honest framing: most teams should pick the lightest tier their audit, procurement, and data shape will accept. Here’s the line.
- Volume sits comfortably under 50,000 receipts / month
- Single developer; no team-member access requirement
- Generic PII categories cover your data (PERSON, EMAIL, IBAN, PHONE)
- EU-region SaaS is acceptable to procurement
- Standard DPA is acceptable to your legal team
- EU AI Act and GDPR scope (not NIS 2)
- Industry-specific identifiers (internal IDs, classification markers, free-text quasi-identifiers) require a custom-trained PII shield
- More than one developer needs workspace access
- Your auditor pushes on customer-held witness keys
- DORA Art 28 sub-outsourcing scrutiny is in your future
- NIS 2 evidence is required
- Procurement requires a security pack (SIG, CAIQ)
- You need a bespoke DPA / sub-processor manifest
- Sovereign or air-gapped deployment is non-negotiable
- BYO HSM is a procurement requirement
- BSI IT-Grundschutz scope or equivalent national-baseline requirement
- Customer-controlled Rekor mirror required
- Critical-infrastructure NIS 2 entity
- Procurement requires a written "no raw identity data leaves your environment" attestation
Self-serve vs Enterprise — questions,
answered.
Can we start on Pro and upgrade to Enterprise later?
Yes — this is the most common path. Receipts you signed on Pro remain verifiable forever (the Sigstore Rekor inclusion proofs are independent of your subscription). When you move to Enterprise, your existing receipt chain integrates with the new self-hosted runtime; new receipts use your customer-held witness key. Auditors verify both with the same public-key verification path.
Does Enterprise really train a custom PII shield on our data?
Yes, optionally, and the training never leaves your environment. The level-3 PII shield is fine-tuned on de-identified labelled examples you provide; the fine-tuning runs in your zone on dedicated GPU. Lucairn provides the training pipeline, the labelling guidelines, and the evaluation harness; your data and the resulting model weights stay with you. The custom-trained PII shield is an Enterprise add-on priced per scope; Developer and Pro tiers always use the standard on-gateway pseudonymisation.
What's the difference between custom training and the bespoke sanitiser ruleset?
The ruleset is configuration; the custom-trained model is weights. The bespoke ruleset is a YAML config that decides which entity types are blocked / pseudonymised / generalised — no model retraining required. The custom-trained model is a fine-tune of the level-3 PII shield on your domain corpus — it catches identifiers the rules can't define a pattern for (context-dependent PII, free-text identifiers in clinical notes, transactional details that quasi-identify customers). Most Enterprise deployments use both; both are Enterprise-only.
What happens if Pro genuinely covers our use case?
Stay on Pro. We don't push Enterprise on teams that don't need it — the operational overhead of a self-hosted deployment is real, and “Enterprise as overkill” is a worse outcome for both sides. Pro is a complete product, not a discount Enterprise. The line crosses when one of the items in the middle column above becomes non-negotiable, not before.
What does the Enterprise assessment fee cover?
Two to four weeks of scoped work: PII exposure analysis on your real data, architecture-fit memo, deployment-shape recommendation, custom-entity definition, sanitiser ruleset draft, pilot scope and success criteria. The fee is fixed and credits against your annual licence if you proceed to pilot. If you don't proceed, you keep the deliverables — the exposure report alone is often worth the fee.
Can we have self-hosted but skip the custom training?
Yes — not every Enterprise deployment uses the custom-trained PII shield. Self-hosted + customer-held witness keys + bespoke ruleset is a complete Enterprise configuration; the custom-trained model is opt-in based on whether your data justifies it. Many financial-services deployments use only the standard model with custom entity types and a tightly-tuned ruleset. The assessment surfaces whether custom training pays off.
How does Enterprise licensing work?
Enterprise is licensed per active workflow vertical — ITSM, HR/HRSD, GRC, Customer Service, and any industry-specific workflows you operate. The base licence covers one vertical; each additional vertical stacks on top. Custom features outside the standard product (bespoke integrations, dedicated workflows, framework-specific customisations, custom-trained PII shields) are scoped separately during the assessment and billed as engagement work. Specific pricing is disclosed in scope-specific procurement conversations, not on the marketing site.
From assessment
to production.
Run the self-serve assessment against your AI workflow and see whether self-serve covers it or the line crosses to Enterprise. 15 minutes. Output goes to your DPO.