A custodian whose runway exceeds the lock.
A vault that promises to outlive a civilization is only as honest as the funding model behind it. A subscription company that goes broke in twelve years has, in practice, sealed nothing for a hundred. The Endowment is the answer to that.
Pricing for permanence, not for growth
Most software pricing assumes the user can leave when they stop paying. AION cannot accept that contract. A vault that expires when the credit card declines is not a vault. So the pricing model is structured so that a single one-time contribution funds the cryptographic primitives and storage for the lifetime of the lock, with operating costs funded by a small endowment yield rather than by recurring subscription anxiety.
How a contribution sustains a vault
A portion of each contribution goes to the AION Endowment, a ring-fenced pool managed under conservative public-foundation rules. The yield on the endowment funds the seven sovereign holdings, the audit cadence, the open-source maintenance, and the legal defense of the Charter. The principal is not spent.
Storage costs are negligible per vault and are funded out of yield. Audits are funded out of yield. Charter defense is funded out of yield. If contributions stop tomorrow, existing vaults remain serviced from yield indefinitely.
What the Endowment does not promise
No financial structure is eternal. Civil disturbance, hyperinflation, regulatory upheaval, or the dissolution of a sovereign holder can stress the model. The Charter binds the maintainer of record (and any future Foundation that inherits the Endowment) to publish the Endowment’s health annually, including the worst-case projection: at what point would the yield be insufficient to maintain the seven holdings, and what is the runway from today.
The honest answer to “what if AION goes broke” is that the open-source recovery toolkit, the cryptographic primitives, and the existing ciphertexts persist beyond any operator. The protocol is forkable. The vaults outlive the custodian. This is designed in.
Phase 0 — pricing not yet committed
The pricing tiers, the contribution schedule, and the endowment governance documents are being designed alongside counsel during Phase 0. Until they are signed, no purchase flow is offered, no payment infrastructure runs, and no contribution is taken. This page reads as it does today because honesty about that timing matters more than the look of activity.