Orbit costs money from this release. Every version up to 0.43.2 shipped under MIT and stays MIT forever
$49 a month, $490 a year, or one of ten lifetime seats at $1,190 — all USD, bought at yourorbit.team/pricing through Stripe. For an existing install the whole change is one paste: the extension now needs an activation key, which appears once on your account page at yourorbit.team/account/downloads and goes into Settings → Extensions → Orbit → Activation Key. Without a valid key every tool, every skill resource and every prompt returns a message pointing at the pricing page. Three stay open — orbit_check_setup, orbit_check_version and orbit_list_skills — so a stranger can still see what they would be buying rather than a wall. Versions up to and including 0.43.2 were released under MIT, that grant is irrevocable and is not being clawed back, and an already-installed 0.43.2 keeps working exactly as it is; 0.44.0 and later are proprietary, with the LICENSE inside the bundle. The courses and the 99 practitioner guides on yourorbit.team stay free and always will — that is the site, not the extension. Two independent adversarial reviews, one of them cross-model, went over the money layer before it shipped, and two of their findings were real: an outage that would have read as a cancellation and locked out every subscriber at once, and an environment override that let a non-payer license themselves. Both are closed. 1,562 tests pass on the extension, 144 on the website.
What shipped
•Behaviour change — the extension is gated on an activation key. Buy at yourorbit.team/pricing, and the key is shown once on the account page; the database holds a hash of it, not the key, so a lost one is regenerated rather than looked up. Paste it into Settings → Extensions → Orbit → Activation Key, then fully quit and relaunch Claude Desktop (Cmd+Q on Mac; the tray or Task Manager on Windows), because Desktop hands settings to the server only when it starts. Every tool, skill resource and prompt refuses without a valid key and says where to get one. The three exceptions are deliberate: orbit_check_setup, orbit_check_version and orbit_list_skills answer for anybody, because a product that cannot tell you what it contains until you have paid for it is asking for a decision you have no basis for.
•Behaviour change — the licence check is generous about our failures and strict about forgery. It validates at startup and every 24 hours against yourorbit.team. If the site or Stripe is unreachable, a previously-valid key keeps working for seven days on a cached grant — an outage is not a cancellation, and a Stripe timeout that read as a refusal would have locked out every subscriber simultaneously with the buffer already spent. So our own failures return 503 and hold the grace window, while a 401 is an adjudicated no and takes effect immediately. The cache is signed with the key itself, which is what stops the grace window being the attack: a hand-written license.json has no valid signature and is ignored.
•Behaviour change — distribution moved off GitHub. The build is served from your account page. There are no more public GitHub releases and no new MCP-registry publishes, and the source repository is private. Nothing is withdrawn from anyone: copies of 0.43.2 and earlier already installed keep running under the MIT grant they shipped with, indefinitely, with no key and no check.
•New — orbit_braze_step_benchmarks, the first tool ported from Waypoint. It places each step of a Braze canvas against the median step of that same channel across your own live canvases, on the delivered basis, and flags the ones running under half that median. The bar comes from your estate rather than a published industry average, because a published average is not your audience — a 22% open rate is a failure in one book and a win in another, and neither book was written about your list. Steps whose metrics Braze cannot return come back unknown, never zero, since a zero in a benchmark reads as a dead step rather than a missing measurement. 88 skills and 136 tools now.
•Fix — the version check asks the website and nothing else. 0.43.0 made it poll three independent sources and take the newest, which was the right fix for a single endpoint that had gone stale for eight days. Two of those three go dark under the new distribution: GitHub Releases stops at 0.43.2 forever and the registry receives nothing further, so each would answer confidently and wrongly, and a dead source is not a vote — it is noise in every disagreement it joins. The site reads the bucket per request, which is where the release actually lands.
•Guard — the environment override that let a non-payer license themselves is gone, and it is worth naming what replaced it rather than calling this solved. A build flag that skipped validation could be set in the same Claude Desktop config block the key goes into, which is a paywall you can walk around by pasting one line you found in a forum. The floor now is a per-machine edit to the server source. Code running on someone's machine can always be changed by whoever owns the machine, so the point of this is not to make the extension untouchable — it is that the shortcut is gone.