Clearance

The control plane for AI agent spend: policy gates, human CHP locks, Stripe billing, and tamper-evident audits.

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Inspiration

AI agents are shipping into support, sales, research, and finance faster than finance can govern them. Engineering can stand up an agent in an afternoon; a CFO still cannot answer: which agent spent what, under whose policy, with what evidence? That gap inspired Clearance. Across Cubiczan’s prior work — Consensus Hardening Protocol (CHP), payment mandates, agent observability, and auditable finance agents — we kept rebuilding the same missing layer: a commercial control plane between autonomous action and real spend. Galuxium Nexus V2 asked for production SaaS with live monetization, not another throwaway agent demo. Clearance is that productized gate.

What it does

Clearance is the approval, spend-control, and billing layer for production AI agents. Before a high-impact action (payment, refund, outbound tool call), an agent calls: POST /api/v1/clearance

The platform then: Evaluates policy — spend caps, allowlists, blocked vendors, allowed actions Runs a CHP gate — R0 checks (Solvable, Scoped, Valid, Worth_it), adversarial findings, lock progression Retrieves memory — prior decisions and org policy (demo RAG today; Backboard-ready) Auto-locks or escalates — under-threshold actions approve; above-threshold go to a human inbox Meters usage — approved clearances become billable events Appends a signed audit record — HMAC-SHA256 signature-chained ledger, exportable as JSONL Operators get a live console: Agents, Approvals, Spend, Audit, and Billing (Stripe Checkout + webhooks, with demo mode when keys are absent).

Live demo: https://clearance-sand.vercel.app

How we built it

Frontend / app: Next.js 15 App Router, TypeScript, Manrope + Fraunces, server-rendered control plane
Clearance engine: policy evaluation + CHP module (src/lib/chp.ts) + memory retrieval
Persistence: durable JSON store locally; /tmp on Vercel serverless
Audit: append-only ledger with per-record signature chaining (finance/compliance-shaped provenance)
Monetization: Stripe Checkout Sessions + webhook provisioning; Starter / Pro / Enterprise tiers + metered clearances
Demo recorder: Playwright + ffmpeg walkthrough for the Nexus video requirement
Deploy: Vercel production at clearance-sand.vercel.app
Repos: GitHub (icohangar-ops, Cubiczan) + Codeberg (cubiczan)

We composed patterns from our stack — CHP locks, mandate-style gates, spend visibility, Stripe subscription loops — into one sharp SaaS wedge instead of remounting a prior hackathon repo wholesale.

Challenges we ran into

Serverless state: Vercel’s filesystem is ephemeral. We adapted the store to /tmp for demos while keeping a clear path to Postgres/Turso for durable multi-instance production.
Scope discipline: The portfolio has full multi-agent “business OS” platforms. Nexus scoring rewards a billable product, so we cut to one API chokepoint (clearance) rather than boiling the ocean.
Governance without theater: CHP had to be real enough for enterprise judging (R0 + adversarial review + lock states) without becoming an unreadable research prototype.
Multi-remote publishing: Keeping GitHub + Codeberg mirrors in sync while deploying and recording demos under deadline pressure.
Optional live providers: Stripe and Backboard keys were not available at deploy time, so we shipped a zero-credential demo path that still exercises Checkout and memory interfaces.

Accomplishments that we're proud of A live, public SaaS with end-to-end workflows: auto-approve → human escalate → deny blocked vendor → meter → audit
Fiscal architecture that runs, not a pricing slide — Stripe Checkout + webhook provisioning with demo fallback
A tamper-evident audit chain that verifies intact after every decision
Submission pack complete: executive brief, fiscal blueprint, deployed URL, and a ~2.5 minute captioned demo video

Design that reads as a control plane product — not a generic purple AI wrapper

What we learned

The winning Nexus shape is narrow product + live payments + governance, not maximum agent count
Finance buyers care about provenance as much as automation — signatures and exportable ledgers matter in the pitch
Zero-credential demos dramatically improve judge experience; optional keys should enhance, not gate, the MVP
CHP semantics (foundation disclosure, adversarial pass, lock progression) translate cleanly into a SaaS approval UX when you treat “human lock” as a first-class state What's next for Clearance Wire live STRIPE_* and BACKBOARD_API_KEY on Vercel for production Checkout and persistent memory/RAG
Replace JSON//tmp with Postgres (or Turso) + org multi-tenancy and SSO
Slack/email adapters for the HITL approval queue
Customer-facing usage dashboards and cost-center chargeback exports
Policy pack marketplace (finance, support, research) and an official SDK (clearance.request(...)) for agent frameworks
Enterprise path: VPC/BYO keys, audit API, dedicated memory namespaces, and SOC2-oriented control mapping

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