"What's the Catch?" — Why StayPresent Is Actually Free

StayPresent is a tool that handles crash recovery, hang detection, and generates a status page, which usually come with a pricing tier. However, StayPresent is actually free to use. The skepticism around its free offering is fair, so it's important to understand why it's free and what might be behind it.

StayPresent is released under the MIT License, one of the most permissive open-source licenses. This means that you can use it in a personal project, a commercial product, modify it, or even redistribute it, all without any cost or needing permission. There's no hidden feature gate behind a paywall, nor is any functionality disabled unless you upgrade. There's no need for an account or for any data to leave your deployment. Everything runs inside your own deployment, on infrastructure that you already control.

This free offering is plausible because StayPresent doesn't have any infrastructure costs that scale with usage. It's a library, not a hosted service, so there's no ongoing service being provided from outside your own process. The honest trade-off isn't money, but rather that you're running the supervision and monitoring yourself, instead of paying someone else to do it for you.

For a solo bot developer or a small project, this trade-off is beneficial: you get real functionality, keep full control, and don't hand a third party visibility into your bot's uptime data. The source code is open, the license is public, and there's nothing hidden to find later. You can install it with pip, read the code if you want, and use it in the way the license allows.