Licensing & what's free

damn.dev is proprietary, commercial software that you self-host — it runs on infrastructure you control and your data never leaves it. It is not open source. Two things are worth understanding up front: what runs for free, and what a license unlocks.

What's free — forever, no license#

Governance and observation run at no charge on your own infrastructure:

• The tamper-evident audit trail (Trace) — every action, approval, and rejection.
• The Registry — an inventory of every agent and AI tool, native or external.
• Discovery of AI tools running on your machines, and the connectors that observe the coding agents your team already uses (Claude Code, Cursor, and others).
• Cost visibility — what your agents are spending.

The free tier is genuinely useful on its own. Install damn.dev, connect the AI tools your team already runs, and you have a governed, audited view of your AI estate at no cost.

What a license unlocks#

A license unlocks running your own agents on the platform — the operational workforce:

• Creating and running agents, delegation, missions, and the COO orchestrator.
• Enterprise capabilities (SSO, compliance reporting, and more — see Enterprise & advanced controls).

The free trial#

A fresh install includes a 14-day trial of running agents, so you can build and evaluate before you have a license. When the trial ends, the platform degrades to governance-only — it keeps observing, auditing, and reporting; it just stops running new agents until a license is applied.

It never bricks. A lapsed license or an expired trial never stops governance or destroys your data — a governance tool must never stop governing on a billing lapse. Only running new agents is gated.

Applying a license#

Your license is a single token. Paste it into Settings → License — it takes effect immediately, no restart. To extend, apply a fresh token the same way.

No phone-home. Your license is verified locally against a built-in key. Nothing about your license — or anything else — is ever sent to damn.dev. There is no license server and no online activation, by design.

Source review under NDA#

The software ships as built artifacts; the source is not public. For teams deploying in sensitive or regulated environments, we make the full source available for private security review under NDA, so your security team can verify exactly what runs on your infrastructure before you trust it. Contact [email protected].

Your data is yours#

Whatever the license state, your content is yours — workspaces, agents, memories, skills, rules, and audit records are stored in open formats (markdown, JSON) and fully portable, with or without us.

Running it for you#

Prefer not to self-host? We also offer managed hosting — a dedicated server we provision and operate, where you stay the sole admin. See Install & deploy or talk to us.