Beta now, Pro later — an honest roadmap
Roadmaps lie when they are marketing calendars dressed as product. Ours is shorter and more boring on purpose: ship a Mac control plane that earns a place in the morning ritual, keep cloud and Mesh optional, keep MCP scoped, then charge for Pro when seats and devices are something we are willing to stand behind without apology.
That order matters. Pricing before the product is ready is how you invent dark patterns. Pricing after the product is useful is how studios decide with a clear head.
What “free in beta” actually means
If you can use a feature in the Mac app today — process groups, ports, logs, Attention board, local MCP hub, Live Link, Continuity, Mesh wake and Teleport where available — it is not locked behind a “coming soon in Pro” teaser. Soft Free quotas still exist for devices, seats, and orgs so one account cannot absorb the whole mesh. Those caps are shape, not a surprise invoice.
If you hit a soft cap, Support can help expand a real studio. We would rather do that than invent an upgrade wall mid-demo. The companion post Soft Free quotas during beta covers the intent; Pricing stays the public source of truth for what local work costs forever versus what Mesh and team seats cost when Pro is live.
The sequence we are actually shipping against
- Mac control plane first. Discover scripts and Procfiles, start in order, health-check, reclaim ports, stream logs, restart the dead sidecar. Offline still works.
- Optional cloud second. Catalog metadata, device presence, encrypted Continuity — never the source tree. Cloud is useful when you have two Macs or need a preview URL. Skip it on a single machine.
- MCP as a first-class loop. Editors ask for status, logs, and restarts through scoped tools instead of a pasted shell. Hub stays local.
- Mesh and fleet when the studio has more than one Mac. Wake, Screen, Teleport, shared catalog — included during beta with soft quotas where the fleet would otherwise melt.
- Pro when charging is honest. Seats, devices, relay, and admin controls priced when the product can take that money without shame.
That is not a promise that every line item on What's shipping lands on a fixed Tuesday. It is a refusal to sell half a board.
What Pro is for (and what it is not)
Pro is for the cost levers that are not “one laptop, local processes”: seats, machines, Mesh relay, Wake/Screen/Teleport pools, and team admin. Local process control — the board that starts Vite and the queue — is meant to stay free for the work that never leaves your Mac.
What Pro is not: a soft wall mid-sprint that suddenly greys out restart or MCP because a trial clock expired. If a feature is usable in beta on Free, we will not yank it into Pro as a surprise. When paid tiers land, the pricing page and changelog will say what moved and why.
Beta users get an explicit deal when Pro ships (lifetime rate or licence options as published on pricing). Read that page; do not treat a blog post as a contract.
How we communicate without roadmap theatre
Three places stay current on purpose:
- Changelog — what actually shipped on Mac, Cloud, and Control tracks.
- Community What's shipping / What's up next — the living board, not a PDF.
- Pricing — local free forever vs Mesh/seat economics.
If those three disagree with a tweet or a sales deck, trust the three. Roadmaps that only live in sales decks are how trust dies.
Edge cases we will not paper over
Windows and iPhone. Desktop Windows beta and the phone companion exist on the download page. They are not the same maturity story as the Mac control plane. Do not plan a Windows-only studio around Mac beta promises.
Soft quotas vs hard paywalls. Soft Free caps can block registering another device. That is intentional so the fleet stays usable. It is not a demand for a credit card. Ask Support if you are a real studio hitting the wall.
Cloud outages. The Mac app remains useful offline. Catalog sync and Live Link may need cloud; local start/stop/logs/MCP do not. Pricing for Pro does not change that architecture bet: local-first.
Feature flags mid-beta. Sparkle betas move fast. A build can ship a Mesh control before the docs catch up. Prefer the in-app UI and changelog over an old screenshot.
Practical advice while we are still in beta
- Build the morning group you would keep if Pro never existed. If the board is only useful as a freebie novelty, it will not survive a paid decision later.
- Put client secrets in env profiles, not in a shared Continuity story you do not understand. Continuity syncs encrypted setup; it is not permission to be sloppy.
- Treat Live Links as meetings with an end button, not as staging. Expiration is a backstop.
- Read soft-quota messages on the account Overview before assuming the product is broken.
- When something is wrong, use Support tickets for account/fleet issues and the community forum for “is this a known beta quirk?” — see Support vs community forum.
What “ready to charge” looks like from our side
We charge when:
- Seats and devices map cleanly to how studios actually work.
- Soft Free quotas and Pro limits are explainable in one screen.
- Changelog and pricing do not contradict each other for a week at a time.
- Support can answer “what do I keep if I stay Free?” without hedging.
Until then, download the Mac app, run your stack, link MCP if you want agents in the loop, and treat the roadmap as a sequence — not a sales countdown.
More context: Pricing, changelog, community, and What Rig does not replace.