Open source, so you can
check
Manager holds the keys to your clients' backups. Asking you to believe it is careful, on the strength of a page that says so, is not good enough. So all of it is published under licences you already know: the control plane, the plugin that runs inside your Craft installation, and the protocol between them.
Three repositories, and why each has the licence it has
The control plane. What you sign into, and what a self-hoster runs.
Copyleft, deliberately. Run it for yourself or your clients and nothing is asked of you. Modify it and host your changes for other people, and you owe those people your source. A fork that carried the trust of this one while hiding what it actually does would undo the only reason for publishing it.
The plugin that runs inside your Craft installation.
Permissive, because it sits in your codebase next to your own work. A copyleft licence in that position raises a question you should never have to put to a lawyer before you can monitor your own websites.
The signed contract between a site and a control plane.
The most permissive of the three, on purpose. Anyone should be able to read, verify or reimplement the wire format without asking us, including to point this connector at something else entirely.
What the AGPL asks of you
Almost certainly nothing. The obligation is narrower than its reputation, so here is the whole of it against the things people actually do.
| If you | Then you owe |
|---|---|
| Run it for your own sites | Nothing. |
| Run it for your clients' sites, commercially | Nothing. This is the ordinary case and it is explicitly fine. |
| Modify it and keep the changes to yourself | Nothing. Private modifications trigger no obligation at all. |
| Modify it and host your version for other people | Those people get the source of your version. That is section 13, and it is the only thing the AGPL adds over the ordinary GPL. |
| Fork it and compete with Manager Cloud | The same thing: publish your changes. We would rather you did than did not. |
The connector, which is the part that touches your codebase, is MIT and asks nothing in any of those cases.
This is worth more if you are paying us than if you are not
A self-hoster can read the code, but they were always going to be in control of their own server. If you are a Cloud customer, this is the only way to check what we run.
The claims are testable
Manager holds no administrator password, no SSH credential and no site database password. A test walks the live schema looking for a column that could hold one, and fails the build if it finds it. You can read that test.
The promises are named
The security properties are numbered, and there is one test file per number, named after the promise it protects. A broken promise is a failing build rather than a paragraph nobody revisits.
The seam is visible
Cloud is this code with four implementations swapped: key wrapping, storage, provisioning and quota. The interfaces are in the public repository, so you can see the exact shape of what we add.
The plugin is readable
The connector runs inside your client's Craft installation, which is the most sensitive thing here. Read it before you install it, not because we suggest it, but because you should for anything that lands there.
Leaving is possible
If Cloud stops suiting you, the software you were using is still published and you can run it yourself. Your backups fetch out through a documented command. There is no version of this where the code becomes unavailable to you.
Nobody can take it away
An AGPL release cannot be un-published. Whatever happens to us commercially, the version you are running stays free to run, fork and maintain.
What is not published
The hosting layer. Manager Cloud is a private package that sits on top of the open source control plane and swaps four implementations: managed key wrapping, object storage, provisioning and storage metering. Plus the billing, which is Stripe.
It contains no capability the self-hosted edition lacks, and it is what funds the work. The difference between the editions is who holds the keys, the storage and the on-call rota, not what the software can do.
Keep every Craft site in view
Add your sites, install the plugin, and see what needs attention. Fourteen days, no card.
Craft CMS 5 and later. Read-only monitoring by default. Open source.