dctx Desktop is now free. Forever.
For individuals, teams and companies. No trial, no seat count, no expiry.
Starting today, the dctx desktop app is free for everyone who uses it: a single developer, a ten-person studio or an engineering organisation of thousands. It stays that way.
Why we are doing this
dctx exists because of one belief: prompt-processing efficiency. Every token in front of a model is paid for three times, in prefill, in cache misses and in attention. The smaller, more exact and more stable the context, the better and cheaper every answer becomes.
The desktop app is how people who do not live in a terminal reach that engine: designers, analysts, product managers and engineers who simply prefer a window. Charging for it put a toll at the front door of the very habit we want to spread. So we are removing the toll.
Efficient context should be the default for everyone who works with a model, not a premium feature.
What you get
- The same engine as the command line and the library: one core, the same privacy guarantee, the same output.
- Drag-and-drop or native folder selection, and snapshots generated without blocking the interface.
- Your global dctx settings and ignore rules, applied exactly as on the command line.
- Everything runs on your machine. No account, no telemetry, no network.
The source is in the open repository under Apache-2.0, next to the CLI and the core. The desktop app is a preview on its own version line (0.11), source only: there is no download yet, so build it from the repository.
What does not change
dctx remains open source. The repository is ongoing work, and we publish what we measure, including where we still have work to do, as in our first public benchmark.
Organisations that depend on dctx can sign a maintenance agreement for security response times, long-term support and priority work. Paying never changes the license, and it funds the work that keeps the desktop app free.
Already bought a license? Thank you. You helped build what everyone now gets for free.