Hi store team 
I’d like to ask — with no expectations — whether my account could be upgraded to a brand account, so I can register a gadget (and kernel) snap name and sign model assertions for a personal Ubuntu Core project. I understand brand stores are a commercial product via SmartStart; I’m not asking for a dedicated store — I’m happy to publish the gadget on the public store and go through normal gadget review, and to use public-store snaps for everything else.
A bit of background, so you know I’m not a drive‑by request: I publish and maintain a number
of IoT/smart‑home snaps under giaever-online — among them home-assistant (soon), home-assistant-snap, music-assistant-server, zwave-js-ui, nanomq, code-server, home-assistant-hacs etc. I donate a fair amount of spare time keeping these going for the community.
This particular project is a personal, non‑commercial, learning one: I want to explore the
parts of the ecosystem I don’t normally touch — gadgets, model assertions, and image
building — by producing a small Ubuntu Core image for Raspberry Pi aimed at
home‑automation use. It needs a lightly customized gadget (enabling the UART/serial line for
a Z‑Wave controller, and baking in a default netplan etc), which is why I’d need to register
and sign a gadget rather than use a stock one. It would run my own and other public snaps
from the store.
If this isn’t something offered for hobby/non‑commercial use, or if it requires the commercial route, that’s completely understandable — I just saw that brand accounts are granted on request and thought it worth asking.
Either way, thank you for all the work on snapd and Ubuntu Core; it’s a genuinely fun environment to build and play with.
Best regards, Joachim (publisher giaever-online)