Everything is free

Forven has no tiers and no paywall. Every feature is included, free and open source, for everyone. There is no "Core" vs "Forged" split, no subscription, and no entitlement check — the whole product surface is yours the moment you install it.

If you have read older material that described paid plans, an entitlement server, or a device handshake: that model has been retired. Forven is now a single free, open-source application licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later.

What you get — all of it

Everything that makes a strategy survive a gauntlet on its own merits, and everything that puts an LLM in the loop — autonomous ideation, agent tasks, interactive deep-dive refinement — is free.

The local lab

The complete research discipline runs offline and key-free. You get the whole pipeline from idea to paper trading without ever talking to a model provider:

• Backtesting and the lab. Pick a built-in strategy, set symbol, timeframe, and dates, and run a backtest with a 70/30 in-sample / out-of-sample split. Optimize parameters under constraints.
• The gauntlet. Put a strategy through the robustness battery — walk-forward analysis, parameter jitter, cost stress, regime split — and read its robustness score and verdict before anything touches capital.
• The research daemon. The autonomous background loop that invents hypotheses, spawns child strategies, runs them through the gauntlet, retires the losers, and surfaces a shortlist.
• Paper trading and the scanner. Simulate execution against the live feed with no capital, with the live multi-strategy scanner generating signals under regime filtering and risk gates.
• Risk controls. Max position size, concurrent-position limits, daily-loss halt, the drawdown kill-switch — the hard controls are always on.

The AI agent layer

The parts of Forven that think with a language model are included too, built on a strict separation of duties:

• The brain — the sole hub-and-spoke orchestrator. It receives all agent output, routes lifecycle decisions, enforces quality gates, and keeps persistent working notes and self-judged lessons. Agents never task each other; everything returns to the brain.
• The agents — four specialized roles: strategy-developer, simulation-agent, risk-manager, and execution-trader. A hard guardrail applies across all of them: agents never place trades directly.
• Deep-dive strategy chat — an interactive session for one strategy where you (or an agent) iteratively read code, edit params, and re-run backtests.
• Bring-your-own-key model routing — Forven runs LLM calls through a configurable provider chain (BYOK) with fallback. You bring the keys; Forven brings the orchestration.

BYOK — and what Forven never does

The AI layer is bring-your-own-key. You supply credentials for your model providers; Forven routes calls through them.

Forven never resells model tokens, and never sees your key. LLM spend is between you and your provider. Forven's job is to route the call and bound the cost — not to mark it up.

Keys live in the local keystore on your machine. The model-routing layer reads them locally to make calls; it does not ship them anywhere. Spend is estimated locally from token counts and bounded by cost controls. For the full picture of providers, fallback chains, and where keys are stored, see models & providers (BYOK).

What this means for you

• If you want to do quant research without an LLM key at all, you can. The lab, the gauntlet, the daemon, paper trading, and the risk controls are all there.
• If you want autonomous ideation, agent-driven development, or deep-dive chat, bring a model key, set a cost cap, and let the agents work.
• Either way, the safety floor is identical. Paper trading is the supported mode, and the kill-switch is always armed.

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Forven is a research tool. Results are illustrative, never predictive, and nothing here is financial advice.

Related

• License — Forven is free and open source under AGPL-3.0-or-later.
• Agents — the AI agent layer, free for everyone.
• Models & providers (BYOK) — bring-your-own-key routing and where your key lives.
• Cost controls — bounding the spend the AI layer can incur.