Licensing & deployment

Culmen is sold as a perpetual licence. You pay once, you own that version, and there is no charge per subscriber. This page explains what that means in practice and how deployment works.

Perpetual, not subscription

Most ISP platforms charge a monthly fee that scales with your subscriber count. Winning a customer raises your software bill, and you stop having software the moment you stop paying.

A Culmen licence is a one-time purchase tied to a subscriber tier. Growing inside your tier costs nothing extra. If you outgrow it, you pay the difference between tiers once — not a new recurring charge.

What the licence includes

• The software, installed and configured on your hardware
• Twelve months of updates from the purchase date
• Installation support during deployment
• Written documentation covering configuration and recovery

After twelve months the software keeps working. Updates are optional and can be renewed, but nothing stops if you decline.

On-premise deployment

The software runs on a server you control, inside your own network. Three practical consequences:

• Data residency. Subscriber records, usage data and billing history never leave your infrastructure, which matters where regulation requires it.
• Independence. Authentication keeps working when your upstream link fails. A cloud platform cannot authenticate a subscriber when the path to the cloud is the thing that is down.
• Latency. RADIUS response time is measured locally, not across the public internet.

Hosted deployment

If you would rather not run a server, the same platform is available hosted. Maintenance, patching and backups are handled, billed monthly. You can move from hosted to on-premise later; the data model is identical.

Choosing a tier

Tiers are based on active subscribers, not on features. Starter covers up to 500 subscribers. Professional covers up to 2,000 and adds multi-uplink failover and content filtering. Individual modules can be licensed separately if you already have billing you are happy with and only need authentication or failover.

Migration from an existing system

Migration runs in parallel. Your current system stays live while subscriber data, plans and balances are imported and validated against it. You switch over only once the numbers match on both sides, so a bad import never costs you a night of billing.

What is not included

Hardware, upstream transit, and the physical network are yours. Custom modules built to your specification are quoted separately. Out-of-hours emergency response requires a Priority support plan.