Rootwall — schedule of fees

In plain English

This summary is not part of the schedule. Where the two differ, the schedule below governs.

Two roles, two prices. The organisation that owns the API pays $6,000 a year. The organisation whose agents call it pays $1,000 a year.
One joining fee, either side, $350. It covers being admitted and it covers leaving. Exit is not charged again later.
Being assessed costs $1,200 per scope class, and only the agent operator is assessed. Renewal is half that.
Nothing is ever paid to Rootwall for breaking a rule. Where a sum is payable for a breach it is paid to the member that was harmed. The rulebook forbids any such sum reaching the scheme, and forbids that clause being amended.
Prices can change, and you are never bound to one you did not accept. Any change is published here with its date. Nothing changes mid-term, and a member that will not accept a change may leave rather than be held to it.

The fees

Fees are keyed to role, never to party. A member admitted in the Emitting Role pays the Emitting Role fees, whichever company it is. A member holding both roles pays the Receiving Role membership only, plus the assessment fee for each class it is admitted into in the Emitting Role. It does not pay twice for being one company.

Fee	Emitting Role	Receiving Role
MembershipAnnual, recurring	$1,000	$6,000
AdmissionOne-off. Covers onboarding and offboarding	$350	$350
AssessmentPer scope class, on first admission to that class	$1,200	Nil
ReassessmentPer scope class, on renewal of an admission	$600	Nil
ConductDeclared head, currently set at nil	Nil	Nil
Retention extensionDeclared head, currently set at nil	Nil	Nil

The Emitting Role is the party whose agents call an interface. The Receiving Role is the party that owns it. A scope class describes operations against a specific interface: permitted method kinds, ceilings, and what must be asserted.

Why the two roles are priced differently

Not because one matters more. The reason is practical and is stated here rather than left to be guessed at.

The agent operator usually did not choose to be here. It is joining because an organisation it wants to reach has made admission a condition of production access. A membership fee that an unwilling joiner resents is a fee that gets escalated back to the organisation that required it, and that mandate is how the scheme grows. Keeping it small protects the mechanism.
The API owner carries the risk and receives the record. The thing being bought, most of the time, is a matched pair: two independent signed accounts of the same session that agree, which is a positive record that nothing went wrong. The party that would otherwise be explaining itself is the one that wants it.

The agent operator still pays for its own assessment. This is not the API owner paying for an audit of its partners.

Why the API owner pays no assessment fee

Because there is currently nothing to assess it against. The response section of the scope class schedule is declared and empty, so admission in the Receiving Role is admission plus a declaration of which classes are accepted. It is membership, not an audit, and it is described that way deliberately.

If that section is ever written, an assessment fee for the Receiving Role will be published here before it is charged to anyone.

What is never charged

No sum of any kind is payable to Rootwall on breach of a rule, and that cannot be amended.

Where the rulebook fixes a liquidated sum for a breach, it is paid by the member that broke the rule to the member affected by it. The scheme takes nothing from it and has no financial interest in the outcome of any determination, in either direction.

Two further things are not charged. Release of evidence is a duty, not a product, and is never billed — least of all at the moment a member is in dispute. And no fee is metered per assertion or per session, because charging for emission would give a member a financial reason to stay quiet, which is the one incentive the rulebook is most concerned to remove.

Two heads declared at nil, and why they appear at all

The conduct fee and the retention extension fee are listed above at nil. Neither is charged today.

The scheme reconciles every session as a matter of course, and no separate charge is made for it. Holding both sides’ signed records, comparing them, running the rule check and releasing them on request are things the scheme does because that is what the scheme is.

They are declared now because introducing an entirely new category of fee later would, under the rulebook’s amendment provisions, be an event that entitles every existing member to withdraw. Publishing a figure against a head that has already been declared is not. Declaring them at nil is what stops us inventing a new kind of charge later, and it is why we do not have to pretend nothing will ever be charged.

If a figure is ever set against the conduct head, it would relate to volume — a member whose traffic the scheme reconciles heavily against one whose traffic it barely touches. Any figure would be published on this page before it applied to anybody, and no change applies inside a period already paid for.

What the ongoing record is worth, stated plainly. The admission fee buys one sentence: this operator passed a test in March. The record buys a different one: this operator did exactly this, last Tuesday, and signed the same account of it. That second sentence is the reason the scheme exists, and it is the part that keeps being true after the assessment has gone stale.

One thing will never be charged for, whatever these figures become. No fee is metered per session or per record. Charging a member for emitting would give it a reason to stay quiet, and silence is the one behaviour these rules exist to remove.

Changes to this schedule

These prices are not promised to stay where they are, and this page does not pretend otherwise. What is promised is that no member is ever held to a price it did not agree to.

What changed in version 1.2, published 3 September 2026. Admission returns to $350 on both sides and assessment to $1,200 per scope class — the figures first published at version 1.0. Membership and reassessment are unchanged and have never moved. The two heads declared at nil are described more fully below.

Version 1.1 raised both fees earlier the same day, and this version reverses that. The comparison behind 1.1 stands: a comparable published schedule charges a company of this size several times more to join and to be certified, and this scheme is knowingly priced below it.

The reason for coming back is who the increase fell on. The agent operator is usually here because an organisation it wants to reach made admission a condition of access. Under 1.1 its first-year total would have risen by more than half, while the API owner's rose by a tenth. A scheme that grows by one member requiring admission of another should not make that requirement expensive to impose.

Both earlier versions remain readable, at version 1.0 and version 1.1.

Nothing changes mid-term. A change published here applies at a member's next renewal, never inside a period already paid for.
A member that will not accept a change may leave. The rulebook's amendment provisions require notice and permit withdrawal by a member that does not accept what is being changed. That right is what protects a member which has already built against the scheme, and it does not depend on any promise about price.
Every version of this page stays readable. Superseded versions remain published, with their dates, on the version history. Version 1.0 and version 1.1 each remain readable at their own address.
Fees are not rules. They can change on this schedule without amending the rulebook. What cannot change is the rulebook's prohibition on any sum reaching the scheme on breach.
Amounts are in US dollars and are exclusive of VAT. Rootwall.ai Ltd is registered for UK value added tax. VAT is added where it applies, as is any other tax applying in the member's jurisdiction.