Why every driver is in the base licence

We get asked, fairly, why the Raylux base licence includes every driver and OPC UA when conventional SCADA pricing sells connectivity piece by piece. This post is the answer: what "included" means, what we charge for instead, and where the limits are.

What "included" means

The Base Gateway is $995, perpetual. It includes:

• Every native driver: Allen-Bradley over EtherNet/IP, Siemens S7, Modbus TCP and RTU, AutomationDirect CLICK, Omron FINS, DNP3 and BACnet/IP. None is sold separately.
• OPC UA as both a client and a server. There is no OPC server to license alongside the gateway.
• Unlimited tags, devices and users.
• Studio for every engineer, free, on as many machines as they like.
• Alarm evaluation, the alarm journal and the audit trail.

The compatibility page lists every driver by device family, and each one is in every licence. If your device is not on the list, the gateway reads anything that offers Modbus or an OPC UA server. If it offers neither, ask us and we will say so, as the page does.

Two things are not in the base licence, and we would rather you read them here than discover them on a quote. Operator screens are the Spectrum module. Tag history is the historian module. The gateway records history either way, so licensing the historian later brings the whole archive with it instead of starting empty.

MQTT and Sparkplug B are planned, not shipped. They are on the roadmap with no date, and nothing here depends on them.

Why connecting to the plant is not where the charge sits

The pricing page puts it in one sentence: connecting to your plant is included, and you pay for what you do with it.

The base licence is connectivity: drivers, OPC UA client and server, scripting and security. Screens are bought on top, as a module. That split is deliberate, and it means the base price buys nothing an operator sees. What it buys is a gateway that reads your devices, runs your logic, evaluates alarms and records an audit trail.

Per-engineer charges get the same treatment. Paying per designer seat is a tax on the people building the system, so Studio is free and unlimited. The same goes for per-protocol charges. A plant that speaks five protocols should not be penalised for the number of brands it was built from.

What we do charge for

Operator clients

The one metered axis is concurrent operator clients: Spectrum sessions in a browser, on a phone or tablet, and Lens panels. The Spectrum module is $1,950 with two clients included. Beyond two, each client is $195, up to nine.

The count is how many screens are open at once, not how many people have logins. A plant with forty operators across three shifts and six terminals needs six clients. Studio, the configuration console and your own REST and WebSocket clients are not counted.

Past nine you buy capacity instead of counting: $2,450 for up to 10, $4,950 for up to 25, $7,500 for unlimited. The price steps up at ten clients on purpose, so you can stop counting seats once you have a lot of them. The two included clients sit in the Spectrum module because a client is a Spectrum session. Two clients on a gateway that could not serve a screen would mean nothing.

One limit worth knowing: if the client limit is reached, the new session is refused and the message says which limit was hit. An established operator screen is never dropped for a licensing reason.

Add-ons

Priced separately, and shipping today:

• Historian, $1,750, unlimited tags and connections.
• Reporting, $1,950.
• Alarm notification, $995 with email, then $495 for SMS and $495 for voice calls. All three together are $1,795.

The Support Plan

Optional, 20% of licence value a year, which is $199 for a base gateway alone. Every licence includes email support with no expiry. The plan adds a next-business-day response, a phone line during business hours, and generation upgrades. Let it lapse and the licence keeps working.

We chose 20% because it is the industry norm, so you can compare it with what you already pay without doing arithmetic. It also scales with what you bought, so a single skid is not charged like a plant.

We are a small team, and the plan reflects that. Next business day is what we can keep. Four-hour, 24/7 and same-day cover are not offered, and there is no 3 a.m. number yet. If your plant needs that, tell us before you buy and we will say whether Raylux fits. A bug that affects a running plant is fixed and shipped to everyone, plan or no plan.

Edge

The Edge Panel ($995) and Edge skid ($495) are fixed packages for one machine: 45 days of history retained on the machine, and for the panel, three concurrent clients. They are a fixed scope, not a smaller product, and they do not take add-ons. The same contents bought as modules come to $4,695, so the scope cap is what the lower price pays for.

Why the prices are published

Every price is on the pricing page, with the modules broken out and a configurator that quotes your actual plant, including the cost over five or ten years against what you pay now. The comparison page lists the nine things a conventional stack bills for that we do not, without naming any vendor. You can work out the total yourself, before you talk to us.

What a perpetual licence means for a running gateway

You buy the version you install and keep running it. There is no renewal that switches the plant off.

Updates within a generation are yours: a licence entitles every release inside its platform generation, so a patch never forces you forward. Crossing a generation is an upgrade, free with the Support Plan and paid without it. And a licence is a signed file, not a phone-home check, so a gateway on an isolated network activates and stays activated with no route to the internet.

Check it yourself

The downloads page has the installer, and the trial unlocks every driver, every module, unlimited tags and clients for two hours, restartable as often as you like. Point it at the PLC on your bench and read a tag before you decide anything.

Frequently asked questions