"What's the Catch?" — Why StayPresent Is Actually Free

A tool that handles crash recovery, hang detection, and a full status page sounds like it should cost something. Here's why it doesn't, and won't. "What's the Catch?" — Why StayPresent Is Actually Free It's a reasonable question. A tool that handles crash recovery, hang detection, and generates a real status page — the kind of thing you'd expect to see behind a pricing page with a "Pro" tier — is, in fact, entirely free. Not a free tier that nudges you toward upgrading. Not a trial. Just free. Here's the honest answer to "what's the catch," because the skepticism is fair. The MIT license, plainly stated StayPresent is released under the MIT License — one of the most permissive open-source licenses that exists. In practice, that means: use it in a personal project, use it in something you're charging money for, modify it, redistribute it, all without paying anything or asking permission. There's no feature gate waiting behind a paywall, and no functionality quietly disabled unless you upgrade. No account required, no data leaving your deployment There's no account to create, no API key issued by a third party, no external service your bot phones home to. Everything — the web server, the crash recovery, the status page, the hang detection — runs directly inside your own deployment, on infrastructure you already control. There's genuinely nothing to charge for on the vendor side, because there's no ongoing service being provided from outside your own process. Why "free forever" is actually plausible here A lot of "free" developer tools eventually aren't, because they're subsidizing a hosted service somewhere — servers, bandwidth, support staff — and the free tier exists to fund a business built around eventually charging some of its users. StayPresent doesn't have that shape. It's a library, not a hosted service. There's no infrastructure cost scaling with your usage that would ever create pressure to start charging. What you're actually trading The honest trade isn't