Will Alva ever lock features behind a paywall after I've already bought the hardware?

We'll be direct about this, because we know it's a sore point in this industry.

The Basic tier — everything that ships with the hardware — is free forever. Manual scheduling, bridge mode, local monitoring. These features run on the device you own. We will not move them behind a subscription. Not now, not after a "marketing test,".

The Autopilot subscription covers features that cost us real money to deliver: electricity price API feeds, weather data services, EV manufacturer API access, cloud compute for optimization algorithms, and ongoing ML model development. The paywall maps directly to our actual cost structure. If it runs locally, it's free. If it requires our cloud, it's Autopilot.

We make this distinction clear before you buy, not after. And we put it in writing right here: the capabilities that you got on your device when you got it and we do not pay anything to maintain will still be free on day one thousand.