What is TOVIO Cloud, and do you need it

The hosted service, what it adds over serving a repository yourself, and where the paid line falls.

Written By Dustin

Last updated About 5 hours ago

TOVIO Cloud is the hosted Forge: a remote you do not operate, run for you. It is a product built on top of TOVIO — not TOVIO itself. The engine, the CLI, the SDKs and the specification are Apache-2.0 and stay that way whether or not you ever create an account.

Three ways to have a remote

Serve it yourself from the CLI

Free, and part of the Apache-2.0 CLI. tovio serve is a real bidirectional TLS server: clone, push and pull against it, with protected lanes and the write-policy gate enforced. It gives you sync. It does not give you proposals, review, lock arbitration, an audit service, hosted CI, or a web interface.

Run a Forge

The Forge is the proprietary collaboration server: durable proposals, events, an audit chain, server-side lock arbitration, and an admin surface. It is a commercial product rather than part of the open engine.

TOVIO Cloud

The Forge operated for you, plus the things only a hosted service can offer: hosted CI, admitted agent sessions, the web application, billing, and an anonymous read surface for published repositories.

What hosting does not change

The object format, the CLI, the commands, and the permission model are identical. A hosted repository is the same repository. Content covered by a policy is encrypted before it leaves your machine, so the hosted service stores ciphertext for those paths and holds no key for them — exactly as a repository on your laptop does.

What it adds

  • A durable remote that is not one of your own machines.

  • Proposals, review, requested reviewers and comments.

  • Server-arbitrated locks, so two people cannot both hold one.

  • A hosted audit chain, and long audit retention on the top plan.

  • Hosted CI, and admission for agent sessions.

  • A browsable web surface, and an anonymous read surface for repositories you publish.

What you give up by not using it

Nothing cryptographic, and nothing about your history. This is worth saying plainly because most hosted version control makes the opposite trade. Leaving TOVIO Cloud is a clone, not a migration project, and continuing without it is a supported path rather than a fallback.

Where the paid line falls

The prices in this collection buy the hosted service and hosted compute. They do not buy the engine, the CLI, the SDKs or the specification, which are Apache-2.0 and free. The licensing collection covers exactly what is open and what is not.