Introduction
eve on your own machine, with a dashboard you can drive. $0 infrastructure.
Vercel's eve is a genuinely good, Apache-2.0 agent
framework, and self-hosting it is a supported path — Vercel says so themselves. What you give
up off-platform is the Agent Runs dashboard; their own answer is to export OpenTelemetry
to a collector you run.
That leaves you with real tools and a real gap. Jaeger will show you spans, the Workflow
DevKit inspector will show you runs, and eve's own dev TUI is better than it gets credit for:
since 0.29.3 its /traces command is a full-screen live viewer over the local trace spool
that replays a session as expandable conversation cards, and 0.30.7 added token/cost/tool
chips plus --verbose and --json to eve traces.
What none of them give you is one place that understands sessions, turns, tokens, cost and approvals, that keeps history for as long as you keep the rows rather than until a spool sweep, that more than one person can open, and that can act on the agent rather than only read it.
evestack is to eve what Ubuntu is to the Linux kernel — not a fork, a distribution. It
packages eve to run on your own hardware and fills in the operational layer that
self-hosting still needs.
evestack is not the first self-hosted eve distribution, and this page used to imply it was. vercel-labs/steve — "Self-hosted eve poc" — was published by a Vercel employee on 2026-06-24, weeks before this project. Nothing here was "kept" by anyone.
Quickstart
npx evestack create my-agent scaffolds it and offers to bring the rest up for you, dashboard
included — it is a compose profile in the project, not a separate clone.
Architecture
How the dashboard reads eve's own Postgres tables directly — no ingest pipeline.
What you get
| evestack | eve on Vercel | |
|---|---|---|
| Compute, workflows, sandbox | your machine — $0 | metered |
| Durable sessions | your Postgres | Vercel Workflows |
| Run-state retention | as long as you keep the rows | purged 1 day (Hobby) / 7 (Pro) / 30 (Enterprise) after a run completes (docs) |
| Dashboard | yes, anywhere | Vercel only |
| Dashboard can drive the agent | yes | read-only |
| One-click tool sign-in | 121 managed-OAuth toolkits, plus API-key auth across 1,000+ (Composio, hosted) | 4 Vercel-managed connectors, plus Custom OAuth and API-key connectors you register (docs) |
| Long-term memory | included (pgvector, your database) — needs an embeddings provider, and Anthropic is not one (why) | no first-party store; the gallery's memory options are third-party SaaS |
The memory row used to read "not included," which is wrong. eve's own
patterns/multi-tenant-memory.md opens: "You can add long-term memory from the integration
gallery using the Memory filter, or build tenant-aware memory from your own application
store." The narrower claim is the true one and still the interesting one — eve ships no
first-party memory store, deliberately ("The storage implementation is deliberately outside
eve"), and the packaged options in the gallery (Mem0, Upstash AgentKit) are other people's
hosted services. evestack's is a table in the Postgres you already run.
The only real cost is model tokens — and Ollama takes that to zero too.
Composio is the exception to "everything on your machine": it is hosted, it holds the OAuth
tokens for accounts you connect, and it is off until you set COMPOSIO_API_KEY.
The honest tradeoffs
evestack doesn't hide the parts of self-hosting that are genuinely harder than paying Vercel:
- Frictionless auth needs someone else's OAuth app. Composio's managed auth is one click, but shows a Composio-branded consent screen and shares rate limits across every Composio customer. Read Composio auth before onboarding real users.
- Cancellation is cooperative, not immediate. We measured a cancelled turn continuing to stream for roughly 90 seconds. See Architecture.
- You own operations. Backups, uptime, and scaling are yours — that's the actual trade for $0 infrastructure and full data ownership.