Donate

stella is free software. Community use has no account, no subscription, and sends no telemetry anywhere by default. Keeping that independent default is the point. Organizations can separately turn on the explicit, signed Oxagen Enterprise managed mode, but that doesn't change the Community default for anyone else.

If stella saves you time or money, please consider sponsoring its development:

Why sponsor

stella is not a thin wrapper around one vendor's API. It's a large, serious piece of engineering, built and maintained by one person.

• Focused Rust code powers a deterministic agent engine, a plugin system for independent judging, a code graph built with tree-sitter, a context store that keeps track of when facts were true and when stella learned them, a multi-tab terminal UI, fleet orchestration over git worktrees, and native support for nine hosted providers plus any local OpenAI-compatible server.
• Verification work is what makes an agent worth using unattended. This includes tests replayed against the previous code in a separate worktree, checks that confirm a fix actually turns a failing test into a passing one, and judges pulled from a different model family than the one that wrote the code. This is much harder to build than just asking the model if it's done. It ships as Vera, stella's installable verification plugin.
• Real, ongoing costs come with all of this. Developing, benchmarking, and testing an agent against frontier models costs real money in API bills — every benchmark run, every provider check, every verification pass. Sponsorship goes straight to keeping that work funded.

Our principles

stella is built on a few rules that don't bend:

• No telemetry leaves your machine by default. Executions, tokens, cost, the list of files touched, and content all stay in local SQLite. The only network calls stella makes are to your own model provider — that's normal operation, not telemetry. Sending telemetry anywhere else takes one of two explicit setups: an enrolled Oxagen Enterprise seat, which can send only a documented, content-free summary to its exact approved address; or a drain block you write yourself into ~/.stella/cloud.json and push with stella cloud sync.
• Bring your own key. Your credentials, your provider relationship, your bill. No middleman markup, no metered proxy, no lock-in.
• Any model, any vendor. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google (Gemini and Vertex), Amazon Bedrock, xAI, DeepSeek, Z.ai, OpenRouter, or any local OpenAI-compatible server — pick per agent, per role, per run. stella doesn't favor any of them.
• Open source, staying open source. stella is licensed under AGPL-3.0-only: free to use, read, fork, and ship, with one condition. If you distribute a modified stella, or offer it to users over a network, you publish your changes too. This keeps improvements flowing back instead of disappearing into a closed fork. Building your own proprietary software with stella is unaffected — the license covers stella itself, not the code you write using it. If you need to embed stella in a closed-source product, a commercial license is available, and it helps fund the work too.

Local-first, bring-your-own-key, vendor-neutral, and copyleft: that's what open source should look like. It's also exactly what the Community edition offers, with no account and no hosted telemetry required.

Other ways to help

Sponsorship helps the most, but it isn't the only way:

• Star and share the repo. Discovery matters a lot for independent projects.
• File clear bug reports with steps to reproduce them, and fix one if you can.
• Write about your setup. Provider configs, fleet plans, and skills that worked for you help the next person.

Thank you for using stella, and for keeping independent, local-first developer tools alive.

github.com/sponsors/macanderson