Local
The free plan. The whole of the building, on your own computers, on the AI subscriptions you already pay for — and neither the pages for your site nor the posts, which are what afk is.
Local is beafk on your own computers, at the keyboard they sit at. It is
free, however many there are, there is no card, and each machine is the
computer you are sitting at.
The whole of it, at that keyboard. A machine with no seat still works
completely where you sit: chat, git, commands, logs, files. A seat is not
what makes those work.
It is not accountless. Signing in is one press and it is what tells this
computer whose it is — the app cannot file a machine under a workspace it has
not been told the name of. What there is no such thing as is a bill:
what it costs has a row for Local and the figure in it
is nothing.
beafk on your Mac is how it gets there, and it is
two presses.
What it does
It builds. Your app, your game, your website, whatever the repository on
that Mac is. Crew works across every CLI you have
signed in — Claude, GPT, Grok and Kimi — on the subscriptions you already pay
for, which are the only thing running an agent costs you here.
Skills, tool servers,
variables and commands are the same ones,
written once and delivered to every agent on that Mac. So are
git, the terminal,
holding files, logs and
the trash. None of that is trimmed on the free plan.
The two things that are not on it
Writing the pages for your site, and writing the posts. Not the sending
half of them — the whole of them.
Articles and the week of social posts are what
afk is for, and on Local the machine refuses to do the work
rather than doing it and holding it back at the door.
The screens still open, and that is deliberate: you can see what the feature
is before you pay for it. What refuses is the action — generate a page,
write a post, put one in the week. The refusal is a card that says which of
the two is missing and offers the plan, or the free week of afk if you have
not spent it.
This is a change. Local used to be sold as "write the week, and afk sends
it", and it did not survive contact with what the two features actually are:
the writing is the expensive part and the part somebody would pay for, and a
free plan that does it is a free plan that has already given the product away.
The other difference, and it is the plan's name
A free machine is opened from that Mac. Not from your phone, not from a
browser on another computer, not by a colleague. The app talks to the node on
127.0.0.1 with a key out of your Keychain, and the cabinet is not in that
conversation at all — there is no certificate to issue because there is
nothing to reach across.
Being away from the keyboard is the whole of what the paid plan is called
after. See how your phone reaches it for the
machinery, and plans for the line between them.
What it does say to the cabinet
Little, and it is worth being exact rather than saying "nothing" — which is
what this page used to say and it was not true.
The Mac enrols: it joins your workspace, and it holds a short lease it
renews, signed by the cabinet, carrying which workspace it belongs to and
which capabilities that workspace has bought. That lease is why the machine
knows the pages and the posts are not yours yet, and why it goes on knowing
it on a plane with no network.
What does not go: your code, your chats, your logs, your agents' keys, or
anything an agent did. What beafk can see is the
list field by field, and Local does not add a line to it.
What is not there at all
Inviting somebody, roles and the
access log are not features held back with a flag —
they are things a workspace with more than one person in it does. Your own
computers still show on the fleet; they
just have no door a phone can use. Nothing on those computers is metered,
counted or reported.
When you want the phone, or the pages and the posts
The moment you want any of it — the panel on your phone, a page or a post, a
machine that is not yours — that is afk, and it is a seat rather than a
different program: the same install on the same computer, opened from
somewhere else. A colleague in the workspace is Business, which is afk
with the people, the roles and the record. See plans and
what it costs.
Going the other way is nothing: stop paying and the computer keeps working,
because what stops is the door and not the machine. See
when a subscription lapses.