Add-on
Automation on top of the same boundary.
RuleFence Pro is a second plugin that installs alongside RuleFence. It adds workflows, conditional policies, undo, scheduling and configuration transfer — and changes nothing about how a request is governed.
- A separate plugin
- Requires RuleFence
- No security control is ever gated
What Pro is
Pro is a second plugin. Its header declares Requires Plugins: rulefence, and it does nothing on its own: you install RuleFence first, then install Pro beside it.
That is worth being plain about, because the common arrangement looks similar from outside and is not the same thing. RuleFence does not ship the paid features switched off. There is no screen with a control greyed out waiting for a key, and no button that exists to tell you what something would cost.
Everything on the governance side — default deny, the permission matrix, approvals, risk, the signed audit chain, emergency mode, readiness and runtime verification — is in the free plugin, for as many agents as you care to run. Pro sells automation and convenience on top of it.
What it adds
Each capability below is gated at the edition named beside it. Anything absent from this list is available in every edition, which is the safe default: a capability nobody remembered to list stays on rather than quietly switching off.
| Capability | From | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Workflows | Pro | Multi-step sequences. Every Ability step runs through the native Ability lifecycle with the request bound to the workflow’s agent, so the permission matrix, risk, policies, approvals, snapshots and the audit chain apply exactly as they do to an external call. A workflow is not a backdoor. |
| Conditional policies | Pro | Rules evaluated against each request. Policies run in priority order; within a policy the first matching rule wins; across policies the strictest control wins. |
| Undo and rollback | Pro | Restores from the before-state the free plugin already captures. Undo is an administrator action that no agent request path can reach, and availability is re-checked live rather than trusted from the stored flag. |
| Scheduling and alerts | Pro | Runs workflows unattended. Authority is granted when an administrator enables the schedule — capability checked, nonce checked and audited — and the run carries that recorded authority, because there is no logged-in user during cron. |
| Approval routing | Pro | Sends a request to the people who should see that particular request, rather than every request to one list. It decides who is asked. It never decides who is allowed. |
| Risk thresholds | Pro | Tune where the contextual risk engine draws its lines. It can still only make a decision stricter than the matrix, never weaker. |
| Rate ceilings | Pro | Tune how much an agent may do in a window. |
| Audit export | Pro | Streams the trail out as CSV or JSON. Every row carries its own previous_hash and event_hash, so a reader can re-walk the chain away from your site. |
| Custom retention | Pro | Choose how long activity is kept, beyond the default window. |
| Saved activity views | Pro | Keep the filters you return to instead of rebuilding them. |
| Agent and permission profiles | Pro | Reusable sets of agent settings and permission grants, so a second agent of the same kind does not start from nothing. |
| Configuration transfer | Pro | Move a governance configuration between sites. The exporter and importer share one definition of what a bundle may contain, so a section cannot arrive unvalidated. |
| Fleet governance | Agency | One view across many sites. See below. |
What is never sold
These controls are identical in every edition, and the test suite asserts it: adding one of them to the paid list fails the build rather than shipping a site that is less governed because of its plan.
- Default deny
- An unconfigured Ability is blocked in every edition.
- Approvals
- Human approval is how a risky action is stopped, not a paid extra.
- The signed audit chain
- It is the record of what agents did.
- Audit logging
- Events are recorded in every edition, whatever the retention window.
- Redaction
- Secrets are redacted everywhere, always.
- Emergency mode
- Stopping every agent immediately can never depend on a licence.
- Native capability checks
- WordPress permissions are never overridden in any edition.
- Fail secure
- Access pauses when audit integrity is unavailable, in every edition.
- Session expiry
- Stale sessions expire in every edition.
A gate may restrict scale and convenience — more automation, exporting the trail, moving configuration between sites. A gate may never restrict a security control. A product that governs AI agents cannot make a site less safe because an invoice went unpaid.
Fleet governance
Included from Agency. One place to see what agents are doing across many sites, apply policy to groups of sites, and handle approvals without opening each dashboard in turn.
Every figure is read from the site it belongs to. Nothing is cached across sites and nothing is inferred, so a site that cannot be reached reports as unavailable rather than as zero — because “no agents” and “could not look” mean very different things to whoever is on call.
If a licence lapses
Configuration already in place keeps enforcing. Existing policies still evaluate, existing workflows still refuse to run ungoverned, and retention keeps whatever window it was given.
What lapses is the ability to add or change paid features.
Turning enforcement off on expiry would mean billing could quietly widen what agents are allowed to do — the exact failure this product exists to prevent. Your site keeps working, and the plugin does not disable itself or lock your dashboard.
Installing alongside
- Install and activate RuleFence, and finish its guided setup.
- Install RuleFence Pro as a second plugin and activate it.
- Enter your licence key. The paid capabilities appear in the screens you already know — Pro adds to them rather than replacing them.
Removing Pro later leaves RuleFence governing exactly as it did before. Nothing in the free plugin depends on the add-on being present.
RuleFence Pro