Managoat is the hosted Fountain. Fountain is the open-source engine, and its name is on the CLI, the API, the SDK and this manual. Everything here applies to Managoat unless a page says it is for a self-hosted server.
Open source
Fountain is an open-source project. Managoat is one hosted instance of it. This page says what is open, what is not, and where each thing lives.
The names
| Name | What it is |
|---|---|
| Fountain | The server, the CLI, the SDK and this manual. The name of the project. |
| Managoat | The instance that the maintainer runs at managoat.com. It runs the same code that you can run. |
The hosted instance has a different name so that "self-host Fountain" and "use Managoat" are two clear choices. The project is not renamed.
The licences
| Part | Licence | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
The server (apps/fountain) |
AGPL-3.0-or-later | Run it, change it, host it. If you host a changed version, your users have a right to your source. |
ee/ (credits, Stripe and the credit emails) |
Elastic Licence 2.0 | Free to run in your own instance. You may not offer it to third parties as a hosted service. |
cli/ and sdk/typescript |
Apache-2.0 | Build on the API and ship the CLI inside a closed product, with no obligations. |
The client parts are permissive on purpose. A connection to Fountain must never put a licence obligation on your application.
The copyleft has one target. A company that improves Fountain and runs it as a service owes those improvements to everyone else who runs it. The licence does not stop a commercial host, in competition with Managoat or not. It stops a private one.
The NOTICE file holds the third-party attribution.
Where things live
| You want | Go to |
|---|---|
| The code, issues and pull requests | github.com/BinaryBourbon/fountain |
| Your own instance | Self-host Fountain |
| The manual | This site, at /docs, on every instance. The markdown is in the repo under docs/. |
| The reasons behind the design | decisions/ in the repo. The ADRs are not on this site. |
| The hosted instance | managoat.com |
| The CLI | brew install BinaryBourbon/tap/fountain, or the CLI reference. |
| The SDK | @agentshit/fountain-sdk on npm, or the SDK reference. |
There is no separate project website. The manual you read now is the project site, and the repo README is its front page. One copy of each stays correct.
What the hosted instance adds
Nothing that is not in the repo. Managoat runs the release image with the
ee/ parts turned on, credits enabled, and the egress broker on. The
configuration reference lists every switch, so an instance
of your own can match it or not.
To contribute
Read CONTRIBUTING.md and CLAUDE.md in the repo. The second file is the contributor guide, and coding agents read it too.