Community Edition
AGPL-3.0-or-later. The full local-first substrate — persistent memory, MCP server, all recall modes, sleep cycles. Free to self-host, forever.
Open source
Free to self-host,
forever.
Cogitent follows an open-core model. The Community Edition is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later) — free to run on your own machine, always. Commercial editions arrive at launch on top of the same core.
Commercial editions
Plus (individuals & small teams: production features, observability, priority support) and Pro (enterprise: team governance, SSO & compliance, fleet deployment, support SLA), licensed separately at launch. The CE core stays free and self-hostable — paying is for the production and governance layers, never for access to the memory itself.
Auditable by design
Local-first only means something if you can verify it. Open source makes sovereignty checkable — anyone can audit that memory stays on the device.
Why copyleft (AGPL)
The AGPL is a network copyleft license, and we chose it deliberately — but we're precise about what it does and doesn't do:
- Service operators of modified versions must publish their changes. If someone runs a changed Cogitent as a network service, the AGPL requires them to make those modifications available.
- It does not bar independent reimplementation. Copyleft governs this code and its derivatives; it doesn't stop anyone from building their own memory layer from scratch.
So the AGPL isn't a claim that the idea can never be rebuilt. What it protects is the shared commons of this codebase. The durable advantage lives elsewhere — in the cognition layer and, over time, the federated network — not in withholding source.
Contributing
When the source is public, contributions will be welcome under an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA). The ICLA keeps provenance clean and lets the project relicense contributions into the commercial editions of the open-core model — standard practice for a sustainable open-core project.
You can read the ICLA template now; the signing flow goes live with the Community Edition.
When it publishes
The source isn't public yet. The code publishes with the Community Edition launch — that's when source access opens, the repository goes live, and the ICLA signing flow turns on.
Want to know the moment the CE source is live? Get launch updates below — we email
the CE release, and nothing else.