Building on dembrane

dembrane is open source. If you want to run it on your own infrastructure, point your own language-model keys at it, integrate it with your systems, or contribute code, these pages are for you.

dembrane captures, transcribes, and makes sense of spoken conversations at scale. The same platform that powers the managed service at dembrane.com is the code you can clone, read, and run yourself. Our core belief - PEOPLE KNOW HOW - applies to the codebase too: the knowledge is in the room, and we’d rather surface it than gate it.

What’s open source#

The dembrane repository (the “echo” codebase: dashboard, participant portal, FastAPI backend, agent service, and Directus configuration) is published under the Business Source License 1.1 (BSL 1.1). In short:

• Non-production use is unrestricted - read it, run it locally, fork it, learn from it.
• Production use is free if your organisation’s total finances are at or below €1,000,000 over any rolling twelve-month period.
• Each release’s Change Date is its release date plus three years, after which that release converts to GPLv3.

If you’re above the threshold and want to run dembrane in production, there’s a commercial licence. The full terms, the threshold, and who to contact are on the licensing page - read it before you deploy.

The three ways to run dembrane#

1. Managed SaaS - dembrane.com hosts everything: the host dashboard at dashboard.dembrane.com and the participant portal at portal.dembrane.com. You bring nothing but a browser. This is the right choice for most teams; see tiers & billing.
2. Open source, self-hosted - you run the services yourself, on your own infrastructure, with your own database, object storage, and language-model providers. Start with self-hosting.
3. Self-hosted with your own data location and providers - the same as above, tuned for data residency (for example, EU-only regions and providers). See the EU residency notes in self-hosting and configuration & LLM providers.

The managed service and the open-source code are the same product. Tier gating (for example, which features need a Changemaker workspace) is a billing concept on the managed service; when you self-host you operate the whole platform.

The pages here#

Run it yourself

• Self-hosting - the services dembrane needs, the dev container, ports, environment files, and EU-residency options.
• Configuration & LLM providers - wiring up language models with the LiteLLM router, transcription and embedding providers, EU regions, and feature toggles.
• Authentication - how dembrane authenticates requests: Directus JWTs, static integration tokens, and the staff admin_access claim.

Integrate with it

• The participant API - the unauthenticated endpoints the portal uses to record conversations; the typical upload sequence.
• Webhooks - react to conversation.* and report.generated events in your own systems, with signature verification.
• Export & integrations - pulling transcripts, reports, and CSV/Excel out of dembrane programmatically.
• MCP & bring-your-own-LLM - the forthcoming way to connect your own assistant (ChatGPT, Claude) to your dembrane data.

Contribute & licence

• Licensing - BSL 1.1 in full, the Change Date, and the commercial licence.
• Contributing - how to send a pull request, the CLA, the code of conduct, and how to disclose a security issue.

How it fits together (the short version)#

Self-hosting means running a handful of services that talk to each other:

• a FastAPI backend on port 8000 (the /api/* and /api/v2/* routes);
• an agent service on port 8001 (agentic chat);
• Directus on port 8055 (the data, auth, and file layer);
• background workers and a scheduler (transcription, summaries, reports);
• the web frontend, serving the dashboard on 5173 and the participant portal on 5174;
• and the infrastructure they depend on: PostgreSQL with pgvector, Redis/Valkey, and S3-compatible object storage (MinIO, DigitalOcean Spaces, AWS S3, …).

If you want the deep, code-level reference for any of these, the internal developer guides - for example architecture and the processing pipeline - go further than these external guides do.

Related#

• Self-hosting
• Internal developer overview
• Tiers & billing
• Feature catalogue