Open source and business boundaries

The Premium plan covers optional cloud services and private individual vehicle-work tools. Three local vehicles/history/basic alerts, free recovery/export/deletion and community trust stay independent of payment. The first ten backend tasks are authorized; real payments remain OFF pending the future payment module.

Status: planning. Preserve the existing MIT license and attribution. The project name is abastevo, selected on 2026-10-01; the maintainer supplied its logo. The README composition is pending visual approval. This documentation task does not rename packages, publish a new mobile app identity or register marks/domains.

Free product and hosted value

Core official/community lookup, anonymous price contribution, free email-code/Google/Apple registration and authenticated feedback, essential offline behavior, current local vehicles/navigation and basic confirmation/dispute stay free. Paid plans may sell optional hosted backup, recovery/migration, cross-device sync, advanced statistics/alerts and convenience. Payment must never buy trust, moderation immunity, a better confidence tier or misleading placement in cheapest-price results.

A future API/fleet/merchant offering needs validation of demand, data licensing, privacy, cost and abuse constraints. Design provider-neutral boundaries now; do not build multi-tenancy, fleet services or merchant dashboards before those use cases exist.

License and contributions

The actual MIT license is authoritative; preserve its copyright and permission notices. A repository hyperlink alone does not replace those notices. The OSI MIT text supports commercial reuse under its terms. Past MIT distributions retain those granted rights; a new licensing decision cannot erase them.

Current recommendation: keep MIT during backend MVP development to avoid an accidental mixed-license boundary. Decision pending before accepting contributions under any changed terms: MIT throughout versus Apache-2.0 client/new code versus AGPL-3.0 backend. Evaluate network-copyleft obligations, dependency compatibility, copyright ownership and contributor consent with qualified review before any change. No relicensing is performed here.

Use a simple contribution guide and consider DCO sign-off for provenance (recommended before external backend contributions). CLA only if a concrete future licensing/business need justifies it. Do not claim existing outside contributions can be relicensed solely because the repository owner wants to. Inventory contributions and preserve upstream history/provenance.

Build in public

Publish architecture, source, tests, SQL migrations, consensus algorithm, OpenAPI, release notes and reproducible synthetic benchmarks. Publish progress with actual completion evidence, not aspirational feature claims. README points to roadmap, local setup and known limitations. Add screenshots only when the UI exists and reflects the current release; no invented communities, support links or sponsors.

Delivery cadence: one milestone/branch/PR per phase, one linked issue and atomic commit per task. Reconcile current-phase issues from stable roadmap IDs rather than creating all future work at once. Close task issues through the verified phase merge; local completion alone is not integration. Update canonical docs alongside changes and mirror the merged snapshot to the wiki once per phase. The mirror must preserve manual pages and use a manifest of generated pages; a failed sync is WIKI_PENDING, not a reason to repeat application CI.

Follow DELIVERY_WORKFLOW for recorded publication scope and FAST_EXECUTION for concise evidence. Helpers and Quick verification are active. The current user explicitly authorized publishing this correction/planning phase; future phase issues open only when that phase is executed. Registration is never gated by billing.

Keep private: production database, personal data, evidence photos, signing keys, provider tokens, private operational access, and sensitive deployment/anti-abuse runtime settings. Public algorithm changes should remain explainable and versioned even when specific production abuse thresholds are private. Aggregated statistics need privacy review and sufficiently large groups.

Commercial extension guardrails

Play Billing integration is LATER; backend verifies purchase state against the provider and translates it to Entitlement. Never accept a client isPremium flag as authorization. Handle renewals, revocations, replay and reconciliation before selling hosted access. Account linking preserves contributor identity only after proofs; a paid account does not inherit unrelated reputation.

Brand/trademark is separate from software license. TRADEMARKS.md records the selected project identity without claiming an unverified registration. Revenue experiments must cover measured hosting/operation costs and maintain a credible free product. No prices or revenue forecasts are invented in this plan.