Obtaining access
Lightning is currently distributed through direct engagement rather than self-serve download. Each early access partner is onboarded individually so that the engine, the tooling, and the support model are matched to the systems they will run alongside.
The process is straightforward. Send us a short description of your typical use case — the types of data sources you work with, latency profile you need, and any standard workloads you expect to run. We respond within one business day to schedule a technical conversation. From there, qualifying organisations receive a license key, the product, and direct onboarding from the engineering team.
Early access partners work with us as Lightning matures toward general availability, and have a direct line into roadmap decisions for the capabilities most relevant to their domain.
What's included
A full commercial license covers:
- SpaceCell Lightning - full Lightning engine including all 500+ statistical and data functions.
- SpaceCell Liquid - 30µs Python roundtrip bridge binary for integrating existing models and inference pipelines.
- Lightstream - high-speed data networking stack with industry-leading performance.
- Unlimited Deployments - unlimited environments and production deployments, single organisation. From development through staging to live production.
- Release Schedule - receive updated versions with a full improvements log on a formal release schedule.
- Priority support - we respond to production issues at production speed.
- Training & Onboarding - we help your team design and validate your first pipeline architecture, and optionally include Python -> Rust onboarding.
Packaging
Lightning ships as a precompiled closed binary wrapped in a typed Rust SDK. The engine itself stays proprietary; the integration surface is a standard Rust crate that slots into a Cargo project the same way as any other dependency.
Add it to Cargo.toml and Lightning's API is visible in your IDE: autocomplete, signature hints, inline documentation, and the same compile-time type checking the rest of your code receives. Pipelines you build with Lightning are validated by the Rust compiler alongside everything else, rather than deferred to runtime. There is no FFI boilerplate or separate service to maintain.
Commercial licensing
Lightning is a production analytics engine. Keeping it correct and current — new statistical functions, SIMD kernel improvements, platform support, security maintenance — requires sustained and dedicated engineering focus. A commercial license funds that.
Open-source releases without a support model transfer the maintenance responsibility and risk to you. You own the upgrades, diagnose the regressions, and track down the critical fix when it matters most — often shouldering the fix burden when maintainer's priorities diverge. For an engine running in a live trading system or a fraud detection pipeline, that is an unreasonable burden to absorb internally.
Commercial licensing means the responsibility for keeping the engine correct, fast, and supported stays with us, freeing you to focus on what you are building.