Hosted Studio with license tiers, hosted Postgres, and BYO-DB.

Studio Web & Hosted Projects

Studio Web workspace — browser-based Studio editor with active map canvas, object palette, and toolbar controls
Studio Web workspace — browser-based Studio editor with active map canvas, object palette, and toolbar controls
Studio Web is the hosted version of the Studio — same admin panel, same editors, running on our infrastructure so you can start building without installing anything. It's a separate product tier from the desktop Studio and is gated by license tier.

When to Use Studio Web vs Desktop Studio

Studio WebDesktop Studio
InstallNothing — browser onlyDownload installer
DatabaseHosted Postgres or your own BYO-DBLocal PGlite (default)
Tier gatingFeatures gated by license tierFull-tier on localhost
Best forRemote teams, quick prototypingSolo devs, offline work, large imports

License Tiers

TierIncludes
IndieFull editors, local CRUD, small-scale authoring
StudioMap generation, streaming zones, larger quotas
EnterpriseEverything, team seats, priority support

Tier is enforced at the server action boundary — for example, both generateZoneChunksV2 and createStreamingChildZone reject Indie-tier callers with code: "TIER_REQUIRED". The UI disables the corresponding buttons with an inline upgrade CTA so there's no way to silently bypass it.

Upgrading a Tier

Upgrades are prorated — you pay only the price gap between your current tier and the target tier (for example, Indie → Studio is $150, not the full Studio price). Buttons on your account dashboard show the prorated cost.

Hosted Project Modes

When you create a project on Studio Web, choose one of two database modes:

Hosted (Managed Postgres)

We provision a dedicated schema on a managed Postgres instance for your project. No setup, automatic backups. Best for most users.

The database is built in the background. Creating a hosted project returns straight away; the schema, its migrations, the starter world and the demo art then build behind it, and the dashboard shows the project as Provisioning with Open held until it is ready. A full starter world with demo art takes a few minutes. You can leave the page — the build carries on without the tab, resumes from wherever it got to if anything interrupts it, and the project flips to ready on its own. If a build genuinely fails, the dashboard says why, and opening the project retries from the step that failed rather than from the beginning.

BYO-DB (Bring Your Own Database)

Connect Studio Web to a Postgres database you own — Supabase, Neon, RDS, your own VPC. Your game data never leaves your infrastructure. Required for compliance scenarios and for running the game server on your own hosting.

To use BYO-DB: 1. Create the database and enable the uuid-ossp and pg_trgm extensions. 2. Copy the transaction-mode pooler URL (not the direct connection URL). 3. In Studio Web, pick BYO-DB when creating the project and paste the URL. 4. We run migrations against your database and seed defaults. Your admin panel then talks to that database directly.

Runtime Notes

  • Your plan tier is resolved from your ED5 account each time the editor loads, then cached for the session.
  • admin role maps to enterprise tier; active licenses map to their purchased tier; trial accounts map to indie.