Public vs Premium — by user intent

Public vs Premium organized by user intent — Select, Build / Instrument, Observe, Evaluate, Improve, Govern.

This page answers "what do I do with each tier" by walking through the six user intents that map to the Stratix Workflow. Each intent gets a same-axis comparison between Stratix Public (free, anonymous) and Stratix Premium (logged-in workspace).

Select — pick the model

"Which model should I use to build this feature?"

Surface	What you can do	Limitation
Public	Browse the leaderboard. Compare candidates head-to-head on the public benchmarks catalog. Test a prompt against any catalog model (rate-limited, anonymous).	Public benchmarks are general-capability. They won't decide for your specific domain (pricing in your tariff, citing your jurisdiction, summarizing your documents).
Premium	Everything Public does — and your dashboard's catalog augments with BYOK custom models you've registered. Author custom benchmarks from your own data and run any candidate model against them. The selection narrowed by Public gets confirmed by a domain-aligned private benchmark.	None for the intent.

Build / Instrument — wire your code

"How do I get observability into what my AI is actually doing?"

Surface	What you can do	Limitation
Public	Read the docs. Use the SDK's free tier (anonymous test calls).	No persistent traces, no organization-scoped workspace.
Premium	Install the Python SDK (pip install layerlens --extra-index-url https://sdk.layerlens.ai/package) with your API key. Use @trace, span(), instrument_openai(), instrument_anthropic(), framework-specific callbacks (LangChain handler, etc.). Traces persist in your workspace.	Some framework adapters in private preview — see Integrations.

Observe — see real production behavior

"What's my AI actually doing in production?"

Surface	What you can do	Limitation
Public	n/a — Public is for catalog browsing, not production observability.	No persistent trace ingestion at all.
Premium	Ingest traces from any application via SDK, CLI, or REST. Browse, search, and filter traces in the dashboard. Drill into individual traces with full span trees. Real-time and historical views.	None.

Evaluate — score the outputs

"Is this output good? Against my benchmark, my rubric, my labels?"

Surface	What you can do	Limitation
Public	View public evaluations (2,000+ pre-run scoring runs across the catalog). Read methodology. Reproduce scores in your own workspace if you upgrade.	Cannot run an evaluation on your data. Cannot author or run scorers / judges.
Premium	Run private evaluations on your benchmarks. Author LLM-backed scorers (model + prompt) reusable across evaluations. Author LLM judges (versioned, GEPA-tunable). Apply judges to traces directly via trace evaluation.	None.

Improve — tune prompts, judges, models

"My evaluation isn't where I need it. What do I tune?"

Surface	What you can do	Limitation
Public	n/a — improvement is workflow-internal.	No iteration loop available on Public.
Premium	Iterate on prompts and re-evaluate against the same benchmark. Run GEPA optimization to tune judges against labeled examples — typically lifts judge agreement-with-humans from 60–70% to 85–95%. Maintain prompt versions as first-class artifacts.	None.

Govern — enforce gates in CI/CD and across the org

"How do I make sure regressions never reach production?"

Surface	What you can do	Limitation
Public	n/a — governance requires your team and your CI/CD.	Not applicable.
Premium	Wire evaluations into CI/CD as quality gates (drop-in GitHub Actions, GitLab, Buildkite recipes). Run continuous trace evaluation on production samples with threshold alerts. SSO + role-based access (Enterprise tier). Audit log of every evaluation (Enterprise tier).	None.

Summary table

Intent	Public	Premium
Select	●	●
Instrument	(read-only)	●
Observe	—	●
Evaluate	(browse)	●
Improve	—	●
Govern	—	●

Where to next

• The Stratix Workflow — the six-stage spine these intents map to
• Stratix Public — full Public surface
• Stratix Premium — full Premium surface
• Public vs Premium feature matrix — feature-by-feature table
• Pricing