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

Studio Web & Hosted Projects

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 Web	Desktop Studio
Install	Nothing — browser only	Download installer
Database	Hosted Postgres or your own BYO-DB	Local PGlite (default)
Tier gating	Features gated by license tier	Full-tier on localhost
Best for	Remote teams, quick prototyping	Solo devs, offline work, large imports

License Tiers

Tier	Includes
Indie	Full editors, local CRUD, small-scale authoring
Studio	Map generation, streaming zones, larger quotas
Enterprise	Everything, 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.

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.

Local Admin vs Studio Web in Dev

During development you can run both side-by-side:

Port	Mode
`localhost:3002`	Standalone local admin (full-tier, no handoff)
`localhost:3004`	Studio Web handoff flow (tier gating active)

Use pnpm dev:local or pnpm dev:studio-web in apps/admin to switch between them without editing env files.

Runtime Notes

Tier is cached in a studio_tier cookie set by the admin middleware after each call to the website's /api/studio/auth/verify endpoint.
admin role maps to enterprise tier; active licenses map to their purchased tier; trial accounts map to indie.
Use the getCurrentUserTier() helper in server actions to enforce gating — never check the cookie from the client.

Production Database