Pane is free and open source under AGPL-3.0. No subscription. No per-seat fee. No upgrade prompt. The desktop binary is free forever.
| tool | price | license | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pane | free | AGPL-3.0 | always free, self-hostable, no lock-in |
| Conductor | free (BYOK) | closed source | bring your own Anthropic / OpenAI key; Mac-only |
| Superset | free + $20/seat/mo Pro | ELv2 (source-available) | Pro adds remote workspaces, SOC 2 |
| cmux | GPL or commercial | dual license | open source tier or paid commercial license |
your AI provider — not Pane
Pane is an agent manager, not an AI provider. You bring your own API keys — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or any other provider your chosen CLI agent supports. Pane charges nothing on top of that. Your API bill is between you and your provider.
nothing for the desktop binary
Install Pane, run it, use it for as many projects and agents as you want. There is no seat limit, no usage cap, no trial period, and no feature gating. Everything in the desktop app is included.
the license makes it hard to charge
Pane is AGPL-3.0. Anyone can compile and distribute the binary for free. Charging for a download would be immediately subverted by the license — so we don't bother. The open license is not a concession; it's the point. You can audit every line, fork it, self-host it, and never be locked in.
monetization comes from services, not the app
Dcouple Inc (the company behind Pane) plans to generate revenue through separate paid services — managed cloud worktrees, team collaboration features, and similar infrastructure. These are optional layers on top of the free local app. The desktop binary is not the business. This is the same model as Grafana, GitLab, and MongoDB: open core, paid cloud.