← Field notes

What hosted means when we can’t read your memory

Bourdon Hosted is live: a private Bourdon instance — your own machine, your own volume, your own *.bourdon.app endpoint — that Claude, ChatGPT, and your coding agents connect to directly. $29 a month solo, $99 for a team of five seats, same engine either way.

A hosted memory service has one question it owes you an honest answer to: what can the operator see?Most answers to that question are policy (“we promise not to look”). We tried to make ours structural instead, and this note is the mechanics.

The rule the control plane is built around

The system that takes your payment and runs your instance records where your memory lives and who pays for it — never the memory itself. Your library sits on your instance’s own encrypted volume. The account database can answer “which machine, which volume, what state, which subscription” and cannot answer “what do this person’s agents remember.” Any feature that would require reading library content is treated as a design error, and a test in the control plane’s CI fails if a route that touches memory content ever appears.

Honesty about root

We operate the machines, which means we hold root on them. Pretending otherwise would be theater. The check on that power is that you can see it used: every privileged action taken on your instance lands in an audit log rendered in your console — provisioning steps, pauses, team changes, everything. An audit log only the operator can read is not a control. Yours is the one that counts.

Failure modes, stated in advance

Teams, and leaving well

The $99 tier is capacity, not a feature cliff: one instance, five console seats, a bigger machine. A solo customer and a team run the same product. The part we care most about is offboarding: when an owner removes a member, that member’s console access ends on their next request, and every agent credential they minted through the console is revoked in the same act. An employee leaves; their laptop’s agents lose memory access that moment; nobody else re-consents to anything.

The exit is part of the product

The engine is free to self-host, and hosted runs the same one. Moving off hosted is a supported path, not a betrayal we make expensive. You pay for uptime and operations — never for features, and never because leaving is hard.

Hosted lives at app.bourdon.ai. The precise promises are written where they are enforceable — the privacy policy maps each claim to a system behavior.