Renting made sense when software was expensive. It isn't anymore.

Why SaaS existed

Software as a service was never about the software. It was about who paid for the engineers.

Building a support desk or a status page took a team. Operating it took another. Nobody sensible wanted to fund either for a tool that was a means to an end, so the market did what it does: one company built the thing once and rented it to everyone. You gave up your data, your price, and your say over the roadmap. In exchange you never had to think about it.

That was a good trade for twenty years. It rested on one assumption: that writing and running software stays expensive. That assumption is gone. A capable agent now builds, tests, and maintains a complete product in the time a procurement call used to take. When the cost of making the thing approaches zero, the rent stops being a bargain and starts being a toll.

Ownership used to mean maintenance

The thing SaaS really sold you out of was the burden. Self-hosting meant a repo, a server, and a Saturday.

Open source offers editable starting points, often with strong maintenance and support. Capable agents can adapt and maintain them. Run Edit Run must earn its place by saving the total effort of reaching and keeping the owner’s desired product.

The owner’s agent can change any source and adapt useful upstream improvements, including after a deep rewrite. Requirements and verification help it preserve what matters. Optional management is planned to make that work convenient; it must demonstrate the resulting product and continued independence.

What ownership means here

Written baseline requirements guide the products. Editions record applicable scope and intentional differences; inspect release evidence for implemented behavior and test coverage.

The requirements below come from the shared BASELINE.md. An edition’s release evidence must show which requirements apply and what has been verified. These requirements do not themselves promise a management service or production readiness.

These are product requirements for the selected edition. Temporary management previews are evaluation environments with separate expiry and cleanup arrangements; they are not production data storage. Authorised management and editor features also have their own disclosed data flows. See the service terms and privacy policy.

The full baseline runs to twenty-two clauses across access, input, secrets, data, public surfaces, and operations. Each seed's detail page renders its own product contract on top, clause by clause.

Why pay for MIT code

Because the code was never the expensive part. The refinement is.

An edition should provide a cohesive product: useful defaults, integrated source, recorded requirements and meaningful tests. General-purpose improvements we have rights to publish become shared source and verification cases, without publishing private customer code or data. HappyToHelp is the first launch path: standalone is free MIT, while Assisted and Managed charge for deployment, management and update work.

Published editions include their selected foundation source under MIT. Shared refinement and optional management must earn their value against other open-source products, hosted services and an agent building from scratch.