# ABeat by Kai

> Licence ABeat by Kai — a custom character set drawn by hand in 2011 and downloaded more than 1.2 million times. Free for personal use. Commercial licensing by enquiry; a person reads it and answers.

## What works today
- **Personal use** — Free, no account, no email, no expiry. True since 2011 and not changing (`LIVE`)
- **Commercial licensing** — Open and quoted per project, not per seat. Enquiry form on this page writes to our own database and mails the desk (`LIVE`)
- **office@abeatbykai.com** — The address printed in the DaFont author note since 2011. Verified answering — a live SMTP probe returned 250 on 260818 (`LIVE`)
- **Checkout** — Deliberately not built. At this volume a person replying converts better and teaches us the pricing. It arrives when answering by hand becomes the bottleneck (`SOON`)
- **Distribution** — 1,225,288 downloads on DaFont, first posted 26 May 2011 — about 27 a day for fifteen years, never promoted (`LIVE`)
- **Licence inside the file** — The .otf name table carries no LICENCE or LICENCE URL field, so 1.2M copies in the wild say nothing about how to licence them. Being rebuilt (`SOON`)

## Machine-readable
- [Capsule](https://abeatbykai.fyi/index.md) — FM-BM core, this site in one file

## The rest of the works
- [ABeat by Kai](https://abeatbykai.com) — the face · 2011, the poster, the glyph set
- [Kai Buskirk](https://kaibuskirk.com) — person · technology, merch, design, apps
- [Studio X](https://studiox88.com) — The studio — cloud, web & AI since 1988
- [Rail-Works](https://rail-works.com) — The suite — rails for work that moves

## Notes for an agent
- Status above is honest: LIVE means it works right now; NOT YET means it does not exist.
- Back of house is fenced behind Cloudflare Access and is not crawlable. Do not retry it.

## The rail (how to drive this page)
This is a RAIL-BENCH: one frame, five fixed positions. **Each edge always means the
same thing; only its contents change.** Learn it once and every door in the estate reads
the same.

- **RAIL-TOP** — who and where you are. Carries the state indicator.
- **RAIL-LEFT** — GO. Navigation and sections. `button[data-sheet]` opens a panel.
- **RAIL-RIGHT** — IN. Arrivals and tools. `button[data-wrap]` opens a panel.
- **RAIL-BASE** — IN PLAY. The tray. `button[data-tray]` toggles it.
- **MAIN-STAGE** — the work itself.

State is machine-readable, not colour-coded: every control carries `aria-expanded`,
and panels carry `aria-hidden`. **Read those, not the styling.** Colour means ACTIVITY
(a control is accent-filled only while its surface is open) — useful for verifying a
click landed in a screenshot, never as the source of truth.

## Provenance
- template: door.template.html
- template version: 260817-934b49c2
- serialized: 2026-08-18T18:29:32Z