Design-Partner Terms: What "Let’s Talk" Actually Means

The pricing page invites design-partner conversations without publishing terms. The invitation is not evasion; it is the specific shape early partnerships take before they are ready to publish as a shelf price.

The Worthune pricing page names three tiers. Free, which is live today, with a written durability commitment. Pro, which is early-access and invites design-partner conversations. Enterprise, which is scoped to specific platforms. The Pro and Enterprise tiers do not publish dollar figures. This piece explains what those tiers would look like as partnerships and why the pricing page deliberately does not lock in numbers yet.

Why prices are not published

The specific reason Pro pricing is not on the page is that the pricing is being set with the first design partners rather than guessed at in public. Early-partner pricing reflects the specific requirements the partner brings, the specific SLAs the partner needs, the specific usage volume the partner runs, and the specific versioning posture the partner wants. A published shelf price would either be higher than a good design partner deserves (which loses the design partner) or lower than the price the shelf will eventually hold (which sets expectations the shelf cannot meet). Waiting to publish is a discipline about not misrepresenting either the value or the future.

The pricing page names this posture directly: paid tiers exist to add guarantees on top of what is free, never to move what is free behind a paywall. The commitment to that boundary is what makes the design-partner conversation a real conversation rather than a sales one. Callers who sign as design partners are not buying features; they are participating in the design of what paid features look like, and the terms reflect that participation.

What a Pro partnership would actually include

A design-partner Pro relationship, when it exists, would include four specific things that are not part of the free tier.

An SLA with a human on the other end. Free-tier callers get the product as it exists; there is no support obligation beyond the public documentation. A design-partner Pro relationship includes a named support contact, a response-time commitment, and an escalation path for correctness incidents. The commitment shape varies by partner; the presence of the commitment is what distinguishes Pro from free.

Attribution-free integration. Free-tier callers keep the built-in badge on embedded calculators and display a visible attribution on API and MCP results shown to end users. A Pro relationship removes the badge requirement on embeds and the attribution requirement on API results. Callers whose brand promises that the caller is the source of the arithmetic benefit from the removal; callers whose brand benefits from the citation continue on the free tier without cost.

Spec-version pinning with commitment. Free-tier callers can detect drift at any time — every envelope carries its specVersion and a record hash, and the changelog is public. A Pro relationship includes a commitment about pinned-version behavior — specifically, that the pinned version’s computed outputs and envelope shape will not move under the partner. This is a durability commitment the free tier does not carry, which is why the pricing page lists pinning under Pro.

Volume headroom and burst room. The free tier publishes a fair-use guideline of five thousand model runs a month per application. A Pro relationship converts the guideline into a specific volume commitment and adds burst tolerance for callers whose traffic patterns include predictable spikes.

What a design partner brings to the relationship

A design-partner Pro conversation is not a purchase. It is a two-way arrangement in which the partner receives the terms above and contributes specific things back. The partner names the specific requirements they need for their product, so the terms reflect a real use case rather than a hypothetical one. The partner runs their integration through the platform and surfaces the specific rough edges only real integrations find. The partner participates in the versioning and roadmap conversations for the models they depend on. Whether and how a partner is named publicly is itself part of the conversation, not a precondition of it.

The mutual expectation is that the terms reflect the partnership. A design partner’s pricing is not a discount off a future shelf price; it is a specific price reflecting the value the partner is bringing back to the platform. That value is real. Callers who understand this and enter the conversation as collaborators end up with terms that are both defensible for the platform and generous to the partner. Callers who enter looking for a discount typically find the conversation frustrating; the platform is not selling a discount, it is selecting for partners who will make the paid tier better.

The pricing-page language, decoded

The pricing page prices Pro as ‘Let’s talk’ on ‘design-partner terms,’ and says ‘Early partners get terms that reflect that.’ Both are literal. The conversation shapes the terms; the terms are not a template. A partner whose product is a small consumer app has different needs than a partner whose product is a large regulated platform, and their terms should differ accordingly. The published version of Pro pricing, when it arrives, will reflect what the first several design partners actually needed, aggregated into a shelf price that serves the general case.

The pricing page also says that once pricing settles, it goes on the page, and nothing that was free moves behind it. This is the durability commitment translated into an operational rule. Design partners have a specific reassurance in that commitment: nothing they built on top of the free tier will move to Pro as a condition of continuing to use it. Their Pro relationship adds to what they had; it does not gate what they had.

Enterprise, briefly

Enterprise is a different conversation. The pricing page describes it as ‘scoped to your platform,’ which is the honest form. Enterprise relationships involve white-label calculators, custom models specced and verified to the same discipline as the shipping catalog, verified eval datasets for financial AI testing, a facts-registry feed for tax-year changes, and full contractual and compliance documentation.

Enterprise pricing is scoped to specific platforms because the value delivered varies substantially by platform. A national bank’s digital team has different needs than a wealthtech startup’s AI team, and the price of serving each reflects the actual delivery. The pricing page invites the same conversation as Pro, with a different scope. Callers whose needs match the Enterprise description are welcome to open that conversation; callers whose needs match Pro should start there. The two conversations are not sequential; they are different starting points.

What the essay is asking

This essay is aimed at prospective early partners and internal buyers whose procurement processes want to know what the words on the pricing page mean. The specific answer is that the words mean what they say. Design-partner terms exist; they are set collaboratively; they include the four specific features above; and the eventual published pricing reflects what the first partners needed rather than what a marketing team guessed at.

For a buyer preparing an internal case, this is enough to work with. The free tier is defensible for evaluation and, for many use cases, for durable production use. The Pro tier is available on real terms, with real commitments, when the caller’s needs align with what Pro adds. The conversation the pricing page invites is the specific conversation that produces those terms; there is no back channel and no gated tier that the pricing page is hiding.

“Design-partner terms are what happens when a paid tier is built with early users rather than published at them. The pricing page waits because that is what waiting produces.”

A note on what Worthune has not announced

As of this writing, Worthune has not publicly announced specific design-partner customers. This essay describes what a design-partner relationship would look like when one is formalized; it does not claim that specific partnerships are in place. Callers curious about current partnerships should ask the sales conversation directly; the current state is what it is at the time of the conversation, and this essay is not the artifact that would update as partnerships form. The pricing page is.