Open vs. Cloud

Bahama has an open-source tool and a first-party cloud service. They work together, but they do different jobs:

Open Bahama is the skill and CLI your coding agent uses. It reads bahama.yaml, creates a reviewable plan, runs operations through provider drivers, and verifies the result. It works with many cloud providers.
Bahama Cloud is the managed provider built for that workflow. It gives your agent an application runtime, deployments, configuration, an optional SQL database, and usage monitoring through one Bahama account.

You use the same Bahama commands, manifest, approval rules, and agent workflow either way. The choice is simply whether Bahama Cloud manages the application for you or your agent connects Bahama to other provider accounts.

Use Bahama Cloud to get started quickly

Bahama Cloud is the shortest path from a supported application to a live URL. You sign in once and your agent can then create the project, add a database or storage (coming soon) as needed, configure server-side values, deploy the source, and verify the live application. It’s fast, scalable, and affordable.

The Bahama dashboard allows you to easily to view and manage your projects, deployment status, resources, recent activity, request and error counts, compute time, database activity, storage, and current account limits. You can also manage write-only project secrets and scoped development access there.

Bahama Cloud is free during the alpha. Every account receives Pro-level limits, billing and overage charges are disabled, and applications pause at a plan limit instead of creating a bill. Bahama will give at least 14 days’ notice before pricing or billing changes take effect.

Use open providers when you need a specific service

The open-source Bahama CLI can also connect to compatible providers in accounts you own. Today, the official provider set includes Vercel for applications, Neon for Postgres, and a local provider for development configuration.

This path is useful when an existing project already runs on one of those services, your team needs a particular provider capability, or you want the resources to remain directly visible and manageable in each provider’s own account. Your agent handles the provider-specific setup while Bahama keeps the planning, approval, and verification workflow consistent.

Compare the two paths

	Bahama Cloud	Open providers
What it is	Bahama’s managed application cloud	Provider drivers used by the open Bahama CLI
Setup	One Bahama account and sign-in	An account and login for each selected provider
Application and data	Integrated runtime, deployments, configuration, and SQL database	Compose the application, database, and other capabilities your project needs
Where you monitor it	One Bahama dashboard	Bahama plus each provider’s dashboard
Cost today	$0 during alpha with Pro-level limits and no overage billing	Each provider’s own plan and pricing apply
Best fit	The easiest path for a supported new application	Projects that need a particular provider, runtime, region, or existing account

The provider choice lives in your project

Your agent records the decision in bahama.yaml. A Cloud deployment uses the managed provider:

bahama.yaml


environments:
  production:
    provider: bahama-cloud

An open-provider project selects the providers it needs instead. For example, an application can run on Vercel and use a Postgres database on Neon. Your agent reads the live provider catalog before recommending a compatible setup:


bahama providers --format agent

If you do not have a specific provider requirement, start with Bahama Cloud. If the application needs something Cloud does not support, use the appropriate open provider. The rest of the Bahama workflow stays the same.