MAGIC sells compliance. Five tiers. One ladder. Climb it or don’t ship.

Every governance framework eventually faces the same question: how much governance is enough?

Too little, and your AI outputs are untrustworthy. Too much, and nothing ships. The answer isn’t a binary — governed or ungoverned. The answer is a ladder.

CANONIC has five compliance tiers. Each tier adds governance. Each addition is cumulative. You don’t skip rungs. You climb them. And at the top — MAGIC 255 — your system is fully governed, fully evidenced, and fully deployable in any regulated industry on earth.

The Five Tiers

COMMUNITY — Free. Open. Start here.

Who it’s for: Individual developers, open-source contributors, anyone exploring governed AI.

What you get: The foundation. A governed scope with three core artifacts: a declaration of purpose, instructions to run it, and a defined vocabulary. This is the minimum viable governance. Your project has a canonical name, a clear README, and shared terminology.

What it proves: You exist. You have a purpose. You can explain yourself.

Price: Free. Always. Open infrastructure benefits everyone.

BUSINESS — $100/year. Build compliant services.

Who it’s for: Developers building products on the CANONIC framework. Startups. Indie builders. Small teams.

What you get: Everything in COMMUNITY, plus a formal interface specification. Your service now has a defined contract — what it does, what it exposes, how it connects to the ecosystem. You’re not just a project. You’re a product.

What it proves: You have a real service with a defined interface. You can be integrated. You can be listed in the marketplace.

Price: $100/year. That’s the cost of enterprise-grade governance for a solo developer.

ENTERPRISE — Contract-based. Custom governance.

Who it’s for: Organizations deploying AI in regulated industries. Hospitals. Financial institutions. Legal firms. Government agencies.

What you get: Everything in BUSINESS, plus a coverage audit and a roadmap. Your service now proves where it’s compliant, where the gaps are, and what’s planned. This is the tier that survives audits. The coverage audit is a living document — computed, not declared — that maps your governance against the standard.

What it proves: You’re auditable. You know your gaps. You have a plan to close them. Regulators can verify your compliance independently.

Price: Contract-based. Organizations need custom governance, and custom governance needs a conversation.

Nonprofits get ENTERPRISE for free. That’s not charity — that’s architecture. Nonprofits operate at enterprise scale. They shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege of being governed.

AGENT — Autonomous systems. Self-improving.

Who it’s for: AI-powered systems that operate autonomously. Agents that make decisions, generate outputs, and evolve over time without human intervention at every step.

What you get: Everything in ENTERPRISE, plus a learning system. Your agent now accumulates patterns from its own operation. What worked. What failed. What evolved. The learning isn’t a log file nobody reads — it’s a governed artifact that feeds back into the system’s behavior.

What it proves: Your system improves. It doesn’t just operate — it learns from operating. And that learning is governed, evidenced, and auditable.

MAGIC — 255 bits. Full governance. The standard.

Who it’s for: Mission-critical deployments. Systems where failure has consequences. Healthcare AI that informs treatment decisions. Financial AI that moves money. Legal AI that advises on litigation.

What you get: Everything. All governance dimensions satisfied. Full evidence chain. Complete audit trail. Mathematical proof of compliance.

What it proves: Everything. Your system is declared, evidenced, historied, communal, practical, structured, learning, and precisely expressed. 255 bits. No gaps. No exceptions. No “we’ll fix that later.”

The Ladder Is Cumulative

This is critical: each tier inherits everything below it. BUSINESS includes everything in COMMUNITY. ENTERPRISE includes everything in BUSINESS. There are no shortcuts.

COMMUNITY    →  declaration + practice + language
BUSINESS     →  + interface specification
ENTERPRISE   →  + coverage audit + roadmap
AGENT        →  + learning system
MAGIC        →  + full closure (255 bits)

You can’t have ENTERPRISE without BUSINESS. You can’t have AGENT without ENTERPRISE. The ladder forces completeness. Every rung earns governance. No rung can be faked.

Why Tiers Instead of Checkboxes

Most compliance frameworks are flat. Here’s a list of 200 requirements. Check the boxes. Sign the form. Hope for the best.

Flat compliance fails because it doesn’t distinguish between “we have a README” and “we have a fully auditable, self-improving AI system.” Both can check boxes. Only one is governed.

The tier system creates accountability at each level. A COMMUNITY project doesn’t pretend to be ENTERPRISE. An ENTERPRISE deployment doesn’t pretend to have AGENT-level learning. The tier IS the claim. And the claim is mathematically verifiable.

When a healthcare system deploys AI at ENTERPRISE tier, they know exactly what they have: coverage audits, roadmaps, defined interfaces, and full inheritance from COMMUNITY and BUSINESS. They also know exactly what they don’t have: autonomous learning and full MAGIC closure. The gaps are explicit. The plan to close them is governed.

What This Means For You

If you’re a developer, start at COMMUNITY. It’s free. Build something governed. When you’re ready to sell it, upgrade to BUSINESS for $100/year.

If you’re an enterprise, start at ENTERPRISE. Get the coverage audit. Know your gaps. Close them systematically. When your AI agents are ready to learn autonomously, upgrade to AGENT.

If you’re deploying mission-critical AI in a regulated industry, you need MAGIC. 255 bits. Full governance. The mathematical proof that your system is what you claim it is.

The ladder is there. Climb it.

Figures

CANONIC — COMMUNITY < BUSINESS < ENTERPRISE < AGENT < MAGIC