Written commitments — dated 27 July 2026
Two promises, and what they do not cover.
Both are enforceable without us.
The two fair questions to ask a small software company are whether it will take away what it gave you, and what happens to your copy when it disappears. These are the answers. One of them is a licence grant that has already been made and cannot be withdrawn; the other is a promise in plain words, published with a date so you can hold it against us.
Nothing that ships in Core ever leaves Core.
The open-core pattern fails in one specific way: a capability is given away to win adoption, then moved behind the paywall once enough people depend on it. This is the commitment not to do that, stated narrowly enough to be broken visibly.
Permanent
Any capability released in Vigil Core stays in Vigil Core, in every later version. Not moved to the paid edition, not degraded into a stub, not made conditional on a key. If a feature is genuinely removed for engineering reasons, the changelog will say so in those words, and it will not reappear as a paid feature.
Ever
No limit in Core on monitors, users, organizations' members, check history retention, or how short a check interval you may set. Not a soft limit, not a nag, not a "contact us above this number". There is no licence key in Core to enforce one with, and none will be added.
This promise had a footnote when it was written: Core carried a 100-member cap inherited from a library default, which the commercial edition had already removed. Rather than disclose it we fixed it — a promise with an exception is worth less than the promise. If you find another one, it is a bug against this page and we want to hear about it.
Same commit
Core is not on its own release schedule that can quietly slip. From 1.11.0 both editions are cut from the same commit on the same day, and the paid edition is produced by removing code from that tree rather than by adding code to it. That is the cadence, and it is checkable from outside: if Core's version number ever trails the commercial one, the mechanism is broken and you are looking at the evidence.
Apache-2.0, done
Core moved from AGPL-3.0 to Apache-2.0 on 27 July 2026 — a weaker licence for us and a stronger one for you. Many companies prohibit AGPL software outright, which made our free edition harder for a business to adopt than the incumbent we are competing with; and the AGPL protected nothing, since its network clause fires only on modified versions, so running stock Core for any number of clients never triggered it. Apache also means a contributed check type can ship in both editions with no CLA and no copyright assignment. Don't take our word for it — read the licence in the repository ↗.
Every release you buy becomes open source.
This one is not a promise at all, which is the point of it. It is section 8 of the licence you agree to at purchase, and it operates on a date rather than on anyone's decision.
8. SUNSET — EVERY RELEASE BECOMES OPEN SOURCE
Each released version of the Software is additionally licensed to the
public under the Apache License, Version 2.0, that grant taking effect
on the earlier of:
(a) twenty-four (24) months after the date that version was
published; or
(b) the date on which twelve (12) months have passed with no new
version of the Software published at all, applied to every
version published up to that point.
It needs nobody
The honest objection to buying software from a one-person company is that the person can stop — through boredom, illness or worse — and leave you holding a codebase nobody is allowed to maintain but you. Clause (b) answers it directly: twelve months of silence and every version published up to that point is Apache-2.0, free for anyone to fork, maintain and sell. It requires no act, no notice and no living author. Software escrow costs money and needs a trustee to act; this costs nothing and needs no one.
Read this part
Sunset applies to released versions of Vigil. It does not hand anyone your modifications, your data or your branding — those stay yours under section 4. It is not a refund, and it is not a support commitment: a version that has gone Apache-2.0 is code you may use freely, not code anyone owes you help with. And it does not make the newest release free — the most recent twenty-four months of work is exactly what your $149 pays for.
What we are deliberately not promising.
A commitments page that only lists commitments is a marketing page. These are the things people reasonably want promised, that we are not going to promise.
No roadmap contract
The roadmap has no dates on it and no guarantees in it. Nothing listed as planned is owed to you, and buying does not purchase influence over the order. What you are buying is the code as it exists on the day you buy it; everything after that is upside.
No SLA at this price
There is no response-time guarantee attached to the $149 licence, and Core support is best-effort on the public issue tracker. One person answers both. A stated response time is something we would sell separately and honour, not something to imply here and discover later. See support for what actually happens today.
Which is the point
We are not promising Sikur will still be here in five years, because nobody in our position can promise that honestly. A future owner could stop publishing Core, or stop releasing at all. What no owner can do is un-publish: every version of Core already released — under the AGPL before July 2026, under Apache-2.0 since — stays released, irrevocably, and clause (b) turns the commercial releases over automatically if the silence lasts a year. The protection is structural. That was the whole reason to build it that way.