Cascade Authority · Enforcement Division · Est. MMXXVI
The cascade has been given away for twenty years. That was the pilot. Colour Licencing restores the natural order: you licence your stylesheet, your visitors licence their eyes, and everybody settles the Infrared Surcharge.
#000Schedule A — supply side
Priced per property, because that is where the value was always sitting. Every tier includes everything below it, which is less generous than it sounds.
display: blockposition: staticbeigeposition: relativetop and leftright/bottom extradisplay: flex, row onlyjustify-content: center £15gap billed per pixelflex: 1 needs an architect:has(), container queriesposition: sticky!important*The free tier renders #333 on #ccc: approximately 4.1:1, which is
just below WCAG AA. Conformance is available from the Warmth tier upwards. This page is
rendered on the free tier and is therefore its own disclosure.
* With governance. Usage is surfaced to your administrator in a dashboard nobody opens,
and presented back to you quarterly as a reason to upgrade. vertical-align: middle
is excluded by name from every agreement. No explanation is offered and none has ever been requested.
Colour entitlements
Every other colour has a near-enough neighbour. These two do not, which is why they are licenced separately and why one of them is licenced to exactly one person.
Pure black and pure white, sold together. One without the other has no use.
Dark mode is downstream of this entitlement, so every OLED owner saving battery is paying this toll through your site.
Values within ΔE 2.0 of a reserved value, computed in OKLCH, are reserved values.
currentColor is not a loophole and was patched in week one.
Exclusive worldwide licence to #000. One holder at a time, globally.
Everyone else is issued #010101 and the knowledge that someone has the real one.
Visually identical to the free-tier black. You are not buying a darker black, you are buying the exclusion of everybody else, which has no cost base and therefore no ceiling.
Transferable at 15%. Current registry holder: —
A second beige, for sites whose header and body obviously need different beiges.
Then taupe, ecru, greige, oatmeal, bone and sand — functionally the same colour, four tiers apart, each with its own SKU and lifestyle photograph.
The paint industry has run this for a century at enormous margin and nobody has ever asked for a refund, because admitting you cannot tell is worse than paying.
Schedule B — demand side
Charging the people who build websites limits you to the people who build websites. Schedule B bills the people looking at them. Precedent is well established: this country has charged households for the presence of colour since 1968, and several hundred monochrome licences remain in force today. Priced per cone.
| Licence | Per year | Channels & conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Monochrome One cone |
£58 | Luminance only. Pairs with the Internet Explorer 5 tier for an end-to-end greyscale estate, which auditors prefer and which costs us nothing to deliver. |
| Dog Two cones |
£95 | Blue and yellow. No red, no green. Most of the internet. None of the red. Requires 75Hz minimum delivery, as dogs resolve flicker where humans are content at 60 — so our cheapest licence is our most expensive to serve, and cannot be upsold, because dogs do not hold payment cards. The tier is retained indefinitely. |
| Human Three cones · standard |
£174 | Full trichromatic entitlement. The standard household bundle. Contents have never been read by a licensee. |
| Tetrachromat Four cones |
POA | Genetic screening at onboarding, charged separately, non-refundable. Most applicants fail. The failed applications are the profitable part. |
| Mantis Shrimp Enterprise |
POA | Twelve-plus photoreceptor classes, polarised light. No applicant has ever qualified. The tier exists so that the one above it looks attainable. |
Mandatory add-on
Infrared has zero delivery cost and zero verifiable delivery. Nobody can see it, so nobody can prove we did not ship it. No support ticket has ever been raised against this product and none can be.
Included in the advertised total in accordance with current fee-transparency rules, and itemised separately on your invoice, which is the point. Customers do not resent the £50. They resent not knowing what it is for, and then they pay it.
It cannot be cancelled — it is mandatory — and it cannot be evaluated, so it never appears in a renewal review. Enterprise will negotiate it to £49 and put the saving on a slide. List rises to £55 the following quarter.
Bees and most birds genuinely see ultraviolet. It is a real channel, really missing from your experience, and we will really deliver it. You will not be able to tell.
This will be the first product on the schedule that exists.
The only parties able to perceive the infrared entitlement are pit vipers and mosquitoes, who sense it for real. They are not on the pricing page. The one cohort with a legitimate complaint about non-delivery cannot open an account.
Schedule C — rebroadcast & public display
A licence covers the address, not the photons leaving it. If your screen can be seen from outside the premises you are no longer a viewer. You are a broadcaster, and broadcasters are licenced separately.
Required where a licenced display is visible from a public highway, a neighbouring property, or a passing bus. Each unglazed aperture is a transmitter and is counted as one.
Net curtains are accepted as a technical control, provided they are certified. Certification is £35 per curtain and must be renewed when the curtain is washed.
Every pedestrian who glances in is an indirect viewer and requires their own entitlement. They will not know this. You will be billed for it.
A dog viewing a licenced display through a window is a secondary receiver on an unlicenced species, which is rebroadcast, and rebroadcast carries double the Infrared Surcharge.
The dog is also warm and is pressed against the glass, so it registers on the detector from the street without an officer entering the property. In enforcement terms the dog is both the offence and the evidence.
Liability sits with the occupier, not the dog. The dog has two cones and no card, and this has been tested.
We may count the windows, the screens and the dogs. True-up is at list price, and no discount applies retroactively, which is where the money in this schedule actually is.
Blinds drawn at the time of audit are recorded as “viewing suspected, obscured.”
A second screen showing the same page as a cold standby is free, provided nobody looks at it. Looking at it is activation and is billed from the date of installation, not the date of looking.
A website on a kiosk, a lobby screen, a departure board or a shop window is a server workload with an unbounded user population, and is licenced accordingly. Choose one metric per display. You may not mix metrics on the same premises.
| Metric | Price | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Display + CAL Option 1 |
£320 + CALs |
One Display Licence per screen, plus a Viewer CAL or Device CAL for every person who sees it. CAL edition must be equal to or greater than the edition of the website displayed; a Warmth-tier CAL may not be used to view a Business-tier page. CALs are not concurrent. They are per named eye. |
| Multiplexing Clause 7.3 — mandatory reading |
— | Pooling viewers through a single screen does not reduce the number of CALs required. A kiosk in a shopping centre does not have one viewer; it has the footfall of the shopping centre, and every one of them requires a CAL at the moment of line of sight. Hardware, software, glass, distance and inattention are all forms of multiplexing. |
| Per-Cone Option 2 — for unbounded audiences |
£190 per 2-cone pack |
Licence the display by the cones placed in front of it rather than counting viewers. Minimum four cones per display, sold in two-cone packs. A dog has two and therefore still pays the four-cone minimum — the shortfall is not refundable and is described in the agreement as headroom. Mantis shrimp installations start at twelve cones and are quoted by an account team. |
| Passive / failover Included |
£0 | A standby screen showing the same page is unlicenced while nobody looks at it. It must be demonstrably unobserved. In practice no customer has ever successfully claimed this, because the auditor looking at it to verify the claim activates it. |
Indirect viewing is still viewing. A photograph of a licenced display, a video call in which a licenced display is visible behind you, a reflection in a window opposite, and a screenshot pasted into a chat thread are each a rebroadcast to an unbounded audience and are licenced as public performance. We are aware of how this website was built and an invoice has been raised.
Screenshots transmitted over Skype or MSN Messenger attract no additional charge. The exemption is unconditional, applies to any number of recipients, and has never been reviewed. It was written in 2003, when both carriers were the obvious method of sending a picture to someone, and it remains in force on the original terms because no part of the agreement provides for removing a clause once granted.
Licensees wishing to use the exemption should note that Skype was retired in May 2025 and MSN Messenger in 2013, and that neither closure is our concern. The exemption survives the carrier. You may transmit freely by either method at any time and we will not charge you a penny for it. Attempts to establish that this is impossible are handled by the same team that handles the negative scan.
Estimate & checkout
Every figure below is per annum unless marked otherwise. The estimate is indicative, non-binding, and lower than the invoice.
Where more than one dog is kept, add their weights together and select the single breed closest to the total. Four chihuahuas are a border collie. Two labradors are a great dane. The licence is issued against the weight, not the animals, and does not need to be amended if the dogs are replaced with a different arrangement of the same mass.
Enforcement tooling
Our officers carry a calibrated detector. You may run the same check yourself, at this address, right now. There is no charge for the scan.*
* There is no charge for the scan. There is a charge for the result. A positive scan generates a notice, the notice carries a £12 administration fee, and the fee therefore arises from the scan rather than being charged for it. The scan remains free. This distinction has survived two appeals and one judicial review, and the judgment is quoted in our marketing.
A negative scan has never been recorded, so no pricing has been prepared for one. Should the detector ever return negative, the reading will be referred to engineering as a fault and the address rescanned at your expense.
Enforcement
Every object above absolute zero emits infrared. Every body in the dwelling radiates continuously, right now, including yours.
So the question “is anyone at this address viewing infrared without a licence?” resolves to “is anything at this address warm?”, and the answer is yes, structurally, everywhere, forever.
The only compliant premises is one held at absolute zero, which the third law of thermodynamics establishes to be unattainable. Liability is permanent and universal. Finance call this thermal revenue. The deck says: TAM, all matter.
Daily. OFFICIAL NOTICE in red, above the fold, in a typeface your tier
does not include.
A reference number that resembles a case number, nine digits, no checksum, never used internally. A deadline that advances each day and is therefore always tomorrow.
“An officer may be in your area.” Not your address — your area. Technically true of every officer, everywhere.
Is anyone at this address viewing infrared colour without a licence? No occupant can perceive infrared, and so no occupant can confirm or deny the question. There is no evidence available to you and no defence open to you. Please answer in the box provided within 10 days.
Your reference is 447-201-998. Declaring that no colour is viewed at this address does not close the file. It opens one.
Questions
Yes. Everything on this page is client-side, trivially overridden, and completely unenforceable. That is why the business is really the letters.
Pay nothing and lose nothing. Screen readers read the DOM and ignore every entitlement on
this page. The accessibility tree is unpriced, unmonetisable and was never ours. The CFO's
note reads “find a way to bill the accessibility tree.” There isn't one.
aria-label has no hex code.
No. Shipping deliberately sub-AA contrast as a free tier is a regulator handing you a fine and then handing your customers the feature for free. accessiBe was fined by the FTC in January 2025; the European Accessibility Act came into force that June. Compliance-as-a-tier has a hard ceiling: the moment it is mandatory it is a cost centre.
Nothing, repeatedly, every day, in writing, forever.
We know. The account has accrued 365 notices a year since opening. Collections escalated it to legal last quarter, at which point it was established that the customer is a spaniel. The file remains open.
You are the broadcaster. They are the audience. Neither of you consented and both of you are billed. If the person who saw it was a dog, the rate doubles — not as a penalty, but because a dog looking through a window is rebroadcast to a species that cannot hold a licence, and the liability has to land somewhere warm.
Correct. A dispute is an administrative act and administrative acts carry a fee, which doubles on each submission: £12.50, then £25, then £50, and so on without a cap. The underlying charge is unaffected by the dispute and continues to accrue throughout it, including while you read this answer. Disputes are never upheld, but they are always processed, and the processing is the service you are being charged for.
Yes, and we encourage it. Downgrading costs £45 to process and attaches a Legacy Entitlement Charge of £11 a month to the free licence, for the life of the licence, to recover the value of the entitlements you have stopped using. The free tier then renders grey on grey in document order and costs you £182 a year. Most downgraded licensees stay, because upgrading again carries a reinstatement fee and the charge continues either way.
Because the noun is licence. Cheques bearing the American spelling are returned with a further notice and a £12 administration fee.
The payment form could not be rendered within your entitlement. The checkout displays — distinct colours; your tier permits —.
Our engineers have been notified. They are on the same tier and cannot see them either.
Downgrading is free of charge. The downgrade is not.
The Legacy Entitlement Charge recovers the value of entitlements you previously held and have chosen to stop using. It runs for the life of the free licence. The free licence cannot be closed while the charge is outstanding, and the charge is outstanding for as long as the licence exists.
Your free tier will render grey on grey, in document order, with no padding. You will continue to be billed £182.00 a year for it.