Public beta — sign-up is open to anyone

Until today the way in was a conversation. Sign-up is open: you register, and at the end of it there is a real store on a subdomain with a default theme already seeded and ready to edit — no sales call, no invite code, no waitlist, nothing to wait for. Building it costs nothing; the storefront starts serving shoppers when you start a plan. Nothing about existing stores changes; this is a door being added, not a door being moved.

Public beta is a statement about pace, not about quality. These are not sandboxes — a published store is a real store taking real payments. What it means is that behaviour we think is wrong gets fixed rather than preserved for compatibility, and that when a change is the kind a merchant would notice, it lands here first.

Changed

• Sign-up is self-serve. Register at platformdtc.com/register and the store exists when you finish, seeded and ready to edit.
• Build free, pay to publish. The theme editor, catalog, checkout settings and the rest of the dashboard are open on the real product from the moment you register — not a demo of it. Serving shoppers is what a plan buys: until one starts, the storefront is not published.
• Plans are priced per store, and the first month is $1. Basic $20/mo, Pro $200/mo, Enterprise $2,000/mo; each plan covers one store, so a second store is a second plan. The $1 first month applies once per account, to the first plan you start. There is no Free plan. Card processing is billed separately at 3.8% + 30¢ on Basic, 3.5% + 30¢ on Pro and 3.4% + 30¢ on Enterprise.
• New accounts get a one-time grant of $100,000 in AI credits. The agent surface is the part worth trying, and it is metered — the grant is there so trying it is not a budget decision.
• A page explaining what beta means for you. Public beta sets out what is covered, what may change under you, how to report something broken, and where to check whether it is us or you.

Kept working

• Storefronts that are already live stay live. Pay-to-publish is a rule for stores that have not been published yet. Nothing that was already serving shoppers went dark, and nothing needs to be re-published to stay up.
• Merchants already on a plan keep the price they are on. The catalogue above applies to plans started from today. Retired plans are deactivated, not deleted: a subscription still on one keeps its own price and its own card rate.
• Nothing else changed for existing stores. Same dashboard, same API, same keys, same scopes. No migration, no re-authentication, no plan change.
• Talk to sales is still the front door. If you are migrating a catalog or moving live subscriptions, that path is unchanged and is still the one we would point you at. Self-serve is an addition to it.
• The Gateway contract is unchanged. Scopes, idempotency, jobs, approvals and webhooks behave exactly as documented. Opening sign-up did not loosen any gate.

Status for the surfaces we probe — storefronts, checkout, dashboard, Core API, notifications and these docs — with p50/p95 per component: status.platformdtc.com.