Self-Hosted, Cloud, or Colony-as-a-Service.
Three ways to run Colony. Same pipeline, same agents, same state machine — the difference is who operates the pipeline and who supplies the work. Hybrid tenancy (workers in your VPC) applies to Cloud and CaaS as a separate residency decision.
Clone, configure, run. Docker compose for local; Helm chart for k8s. Documented setup is two days of focused work.
GitHub App install plus a thirty-minute onboarding call. First merged PR within a week.
GitHub App install plus a kickoff workshop to scope the engagement. First PRs land in your repos within two weeks.
Postgres state machine, worker pool, managed DB (or your own), GitHub App, model-provider keys. The whole stack.
Nothing on your infrastructure. Workers, Postgres, audit storage, dashboards — managed.
Nothing. The pipeline runs on our infrastructure; our team operates it against the backlog we maintain with you.
You. Your team files structured issues; the pipeline processes them.
You. Your team files structured issues; the pipeline processes them.
We do, with you. Requirements intake, refinement, and acceptance criteria are part of the engagement.
Self-managed infra cost plus model-provider pass-through. No license fee for the self-hosted core. Self-supported.
Pilot from $35k flat for six weeks. Production engagements scoped per repo set and worker capacity; tokens pass-through with a small visible markup.
Scoped per engagement; outcome-priced rather than seat-priced. Token cost pass-through visible in the same ledger your team sees.
Community Discord, the docs, and the issue tracker that comes with your access grant. Self-managed upgrades; backwards-compatible state-machine migrations.
Two-business-day response, dedicated channel during pilots, on-call escalation for production tenants. We run the upgrades.
Embedded engagement model. Weekly delivery cadence; dedicated technical contact throughout.
Whatever your environment provides. The pipeline emits the same audit trail and ledger regardless of where it runs.
Single-tenant by default, scoped GitHub permissions, enterprise model endpoints, encryption at rest, deletion-on-request. SOC 2 Type II audit not yet completed — see /security/ for the controls.
Single-tenant; Colony staff under NDA; same enterprise model endpoints and audit trail as Cloud. Code remains yours under work-for-hire.
— (you are already running the whole thing).
Yes. Control plane managed by Colony; worker pools and code in your VPC. Private preview today; public preview Q3 2026.
Yes. Same hybrid topology as Cloud, with Colony staff operating against your backlog.
You want full control of the runtime, you have the platform engineers to operate it, and you’re comfortable operating the self-hosted core yourself (see below).
You want the pipeline tomorrow and you don’t want to operate state machines, Postgres, and worker pools. You want a pilot scoped in two business days.
You want autonomous-pipeline output without operating the pipeline or maintaining a structured backlog yourself. Common for teams without bandwidth to build out the requirements-engineering muscle.
What in-house legal needs to know.
The Colony self-hosted core is source available: you can view the source and run it yourself. The repositories are currently private while we finalize the licensing terms under which the source will be published; we're not asserting a specific open-source license today.
What source-available access does not mean.
- Running Colony inside your company to ship your own product is fine. Whatever terms ultimately govern the self-hosted distribution, they apply to the Colony runtime itself, not to the products your team ships using it. If you run Colony against your engineering backlog to ship a closed-source SaaS, that SaaS and its source are unaffected.
- It does not infect the code Colony writes. The pull requests Colony opens against your repositories are yours, under whatever license your repository already has. Colony's own licensing is about the orchestration runtime, not its output.
- The source is not yet publicly published. Access today is by arrangement, not a public repository — we'll update this page when that changes.
What the self-hosted path is for.
- Teams that want to operate the runtime themselves — full control over the stack, your own infrastructure, your own upgrade cadence.
- Cloud users don't need this path. Colony Cloud is operated by Beehive Media, LLC; Cloud customers run against our managed infrastructure, not a self-hosted copy. (See /security/ for the data-handling story.)
- Integrator shops: if you want to wrap Colony's self-hosted core into a productized offering you resell, talk to us about a commercial OEM agreement.
When in doubt, ask us directly. Bring the specifics to the pilot call; we don't shy from clarifying licensing questions in writing.
Control plane ours, workers and code yours.
Hybrid is a tenancy variant available to both Cloud and CaaS engagements — not a separate deployment mode. For teams that want Colony to run the pipeline but need the agents and the source to stay inside their network. Private preview today; public preview Q3 2026.
Control plane (Colony).
The orchestration engine, the dashboards, the state machine, the audit-trail surface. Operated by us; you don’t run it.
Worker pools (yours).
The agent workers that read and write your code run inside your AWS, Azure, or GCP. Your model contracts, your egress, your network.
Code path (yours).
Your code stays where it is. Source code never transits Colony’s managed infrastructure; only metadata and orchestration events flow back to the control plane.
Self-host the core, or let us run it.
Either way, no lock-in — the pipeline is the same.