Allow organizations to create and publish "interest-only" data products that can collect subscriptions or demand signals without consuming Data Product Hub RU entitlements.

My customer intends to deploy DPH with a product-led approach to data product development. Before investing resources to build data pipelines, integrations, governance controls, and ongoing operational support, they first want to understand whether a proposed data product has genuine demand from data consumers.

Today, they plan to create placeholder or temporary data products that contain only metadata, business descriptions, and schema definitions. Users can subscribe to these products to express interest. However, these subscriptions currently contribute to RU consumption even though no usable data product exists yet.

This creates two challenges:

• Customers incur RU consumption for subscriptions to products that are not yet operational.
• Organizations may be discouraged from adopting a demand-driven data product development model because of the licensing impact.

Suggested enhancements:

Option 1: Interest-Only Data Products

• Introduce a new data product state such as "Interest Only" or "Proposed".
• Users can express interest, follow, vote, or subscribe to the proposal.
• Interest registrations do not consume Data Product Hub RU entitlements.
• Once the product owner converts the proposal into an active data product, standard subscription-based RU consumption begins.

Option 2: Exclude Temporary Data Products from RU Consumption

• Allow administrators to designate data products as temporary.
• Subscriptions associated with these products are excluded from RU calculations until the product is marked active. No actual data needs to be delivered to the end user upon subscription.

Option 3: Separate Interest Registration Mechanism

• Add a lightweight "Register Interest" capability that is distinct from and replaces a subscription.
• Interest metrics can help data product owners prioritize development work without affecting RU consumption.
• Subscription-based licensing would apply only when consumers subscribe to a published and consumable data product.

This enhancement would better align licensing consumption with actual business value and encourage broader adoption of Data Product Hub as an enterprise data product marketplace.