Licensing & Adoption

Everything your team needs to evaluate Dark Factory for commercial use. The short version: it's free, it's local, and there's nothing to sign up for.

What You Get

Dark Factory is a single Go binary. You install it, point it at a GitHub repo, and it runs autonomous agents on your machine. That's it.

Single binary, runs on developer workstations
Free for commercial use on any project
Works with proprietary and open-source codebases
No account creation, registration, or sign-up
No hosted service or cloud component
No central servers or backend infrastructure
No telemetry, analytics, or usage tracking
No paid tier, premium features, or upgrade path

Data & Privacy

Where does data live?

All data stays on the developer's machine. Run history, agent logs, analytics, and configuration are stored locally in ~/.godark/runs/ and the project's godark.yaml. There is no cloud storage, no data warehouse, and no synchronization service.

What credentials does it use?

Dark Factory requires two credentials, both provided by the user:

Dark Factory never stores, transmits, or proxies your credentials. They're passed directly to Claude Code and the GitHub CLI running on your machine.

What network calls does it make?

Dark Factory itself makes no network calls. The tools it invokes do:

All network communication happens through tools your team already uses and controls. There are no additional endpoints, webhooks, or callback URLs.

License Terms

Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2)

Dark Factory is licensed under the Elastic License 2.0. This is the same license used by Elasticsearch, Kibana, and other widely-adopted infrastructure tools.

What you can do

The one restriction

You cannot offer Dark Factory itself as a managed or hosted service to third parties. In other words, you can't take the software and sell access to it as a SaaS product. Using it internally at your company — even at scale — is completely fine.

Why It's Free

Dark Factory is not a business. There's no company behind it, no investors, no paid tier on the horizon. The project exists to light a path forward — one where humans retain creative control over the architecture and direction of their software while fully leveraging what Claude Code can do.

The harness engineering model — where humans design constraints and agents execute within them — only works if the tooling is accessible. Locking it behind a subscription would undermine the point.

FAQ

Can my company use this on commercial projects?

Yes. The Elastic License 2.0 explicitly permits commercial use. The only restriction is reselling it as a hosted service.

Does Dark Factory send any data to a third party?

No. Dark Factory makes no network calls. Claude Code calls the Anthropic API with your key, and the gh CLI calls GitHub with your token — both directly from your machine. There's no intermediary.

Is there a hosted or enterprise version?

No, and there are no plans for one. Dark Factory is a local CLI tool. The architecture is intentionally designed to run on developer machines, not on a server.

Can I modify the source code?

Yes. You can fork and modify Dark Factory for internal use. You just can't offer a modified version as a hosted service to others.

What happens if the project is abandoned?

The source code is on GitHub under a permissive license. If the project stops being maintained, you can fork it and continue using it. There's no server dependency that would stop it from working.

Do I need to attribute Dark Factory in my project?

No attribution is required in your project's output. The license applies to Dark Factory itself, not to the code it generates or the PRs it creates.

Can I use it in a regulated industry?

From a licensing perspective, yes. Your compliance team should evaluate the Anthropic API usage and GitHub integration against your specific regulatory requirements — but those are the same tools you'd evaluate regardless of Dark Factory.