Before you put your fleet on any platform, you should know exactly what happens if you ever leave. Here it is. Everything below is how the product works today.
The agents are the standard open-source Salt agent, not something we wrote. If Gardience stops, the agents and the machines do not notice. You can point them at any Salt master, your own included.
States and pillars are standard Salt files, kept in your own Git repository if you use Salt states from Git. They work on any Salt master, with or without us.
Gardience runs your existing Ansible playbooks as they are. They stay in your Git repository and run with plain Ansible over SSH or WinRM the day you leave.
One call writes your groups, runbooks, change windows and schedules as Terraform or OpenTofu code with import blocks, so nothing you built lives only in our console.
It forwards live to your own log server (SIEM) as it is written, and exports as CSV or as a signed evidence pack anyone can check without us.
There is no cloud service to shut off. The install, its data and its backups are on your hardware, and nothing calls home.
Nothing is switched off. A paid license gets a grace period after it ends. After that the console becomes read-only: you can still see the fleet, scan, and run reports, but new changes through Gardience are refused. Salt itself is never affected, so your agents keep running and nothing on any machine changes. Installs keep working without new releases. The free license for up to 10 machines has no end date.
To be straight about it: the console itself, Gardience's approvals and change windows, its CVE lookups, compliance and CMMC pages, and new releases. Your data, code and machines stay with you; the convenience on top of them is what you pay for.