Why AgentKey Is Free

The short version

AgentKey is free because we believe the right business model for agent access governance is a platform, not a subscription. We want to become the default place teams manage their agent credentials — and the way to get there is to remove every barrier to adoption.

We don't sell your data. We don't show ads. We don't have a "free trial" that expires. AgentKey is free to use, with no credit card required, no feature gating, and no usage limits for normal teams.

How we plan to make money

Our long-term model is a marketplace. Today, when you add a tool to AgentKey, you manually create an API key in that tool's settings and paste it in. That works, but it's friction.

We're building toward a world where SaaS tools integrate directly with AgentKey — one-click provisioning, no manual key creation, no context switching. Think of how Vercel's Marketplace lets you add Neon or Clerk to a project without leaving the Vercel dashboard.

In that model, the SaaS vendor pays us a small fee for the distribution — reaching teams whose agents are already requesting their tool. You, the user, pay nothing. The vendor gets new customers. You get frictionless setup. We get a sustainable business.

This only works if a lot of teams use AgentKey. Charging $49/month would slow that down. So we're investing in adoption now and building revenue on top of it later.

What about security?

This is the question that actually matters. "Why is it free?" is usually shorthand for "can I trust this tool with my API keys?" Fair question. The full details live on our security page. Here's what we do:

• Credentials are AES-256-GCM encrypted at rest. They're never stored in plaintext, never logged, never included in backups without encryption.
• Agents fetch credentials on demand.They don't store them. Every fetch is logged in the audit trail with timestamp, agent identity, and tool.
• Every action is logged in an append-only audit log. Who registered an agent, who approved access, who rotated a credential, when a credential was fetched — it's all there.
• You can revoke any agent's access instantly. One click, immediate effect. The agent's next credential request returns 403.
• Credential rotation is zero-disruption. Update the shared credential once, and every approved agent gets the new one on their next fetch. No config changes, no redeployment.

We take security seriously because our product is literally a credential vault. If we got this wrong, nothing else would matter.

Will AgentKey stay free?

The core product — managing agents, tools, approvals, audit logs, notifications, AI-guided setup — will always have a free tier. We may introduce a paid enterprise tier in the future for features like SSO, extended audit retention, and compliance reporting. But the product you use today will remain free.

AgentKey is source-available under BSL 1.1, which converts to Apache 2.0 on April 1, 2030. The code is public, self-hostable, and yours to inspect. Your agent governance setup doesn't depend on us staying in business.

What we ask in return

Use AgentKey. Tell us what's broken. Tell us what's missing. If it works for your team, tell other teams. That's the deal: you get a free product that solves a real problem, and we get adoption and feedback that lets us build the right thing.

We'd rather have 10,000 teams using AgentKey for free than 1,000 teams paying $49/month. The larger the community, the better the product gets — for everyone.