Self-hosted AI coding agents: what it means

Hosted versus self-hosted

A hosted coding-agent service runs in the vendor's cloud: your repository is cloned there, agents run on its machines and its staff operate it. A self-hosted platform runs on servers you operate. The trade is control and data locality against doing the operating yourself.

How DevFlow is offered

DevFlow runs as a hosted instance at devflow.fraway.io. A self-hosted install is not self-serve: it is arranged with Fraway on request, through the contact link that DevFlow's billing page offers for SSO, self-hosting and volume pricing.

What stays on the operator's servers

In a self-hosted install, agents run on the operator's hardware. Each task's checkout is a git worktree on that host's disk, and tests run in Docker containers on the same host.

Model calls are the exception. Prompts go to the provider whose key the workspace stores, so choosing that provider remains part of the data decision.

What the install consists of

The production image builds the Svelte app, embeds it and the SQL migrations into one Go binary, and adds a real userland: git, the Docker CLI, the OpenCode CLI and the dependency scanners. Migrations run automatically on boot.

The compose file for production is an overlay with the API only. It expects to be merged into a stack that already provides PostgreSQL and a shared network.

What the operator supplies

The operator brings the database, a reverse proxy that terminates TLS, and the secrets. Required ones include SECRETS_ENCRYPTION_KEY, which encrypts provider keys and GitHub tokens at rest, and a stable ATTACHMENT_SIGNING_SECRET.

The operator also brings the agent images, built locally with a script in the repository rather than pulled from a registry.

Shutdown and spend

On shutdown the server drains: it refuses new work, waits for running and queued tasks, then stops. The overlay's long stop grace period gives it time to do that during a deploy.

Self-hosting pairs naturally with bring your own key. Spend goes straight to the workspace's provider accounts, and DevFlow's monthly cap still applies if one is set.