For a while now, Grove has had one job: make local development on your machine effortless. Serve *.test with real HTTPS, bundle PHP, Node, and databases, run your dev processes, and get out of your way. All of it free, all of it open source.
Today we're adding something new — Grove Pro — and before anything else, we want to be clear about what it isn't.
Grove Pro does not lock away the things you already rely on. Serving sites, local HTTPS, bundled PHP/Node/databases, the mail-catcher, tunnels, the request timeline, database snapshots — that's the heart of Grove, and it stays free and open source, forever. We built Grove partly because other tools put databases, mail testing, and dumps behind a paywall, and we're not about to make the same move.
So what is Pro? It's the layer that appears the moment you stop working alone.
Everything's fine on your machine. The right PHP version, a seeded database, the .env you carefully assembled. Then a teammate clones the repo — and none of that travels with the code. The PHP version is a guess. The database doesn't exist. The .env gets pasted into Slack. Onboarding a new hire means a half-day of README archaeology.
These aren't local-dev problems. They're team problems — coordination, secrets, reproducibility — and they're exactly what Grove is positioned to solve, because Grove already manages every one of those pieces. Grove Pro is that team layer:
End-to-end encrypted secret sync — your project's .env shared securely, never pasted into a chat window again.
Reproducible team environments — commit a grove.toml, and a teammate goes from git clone to a running, identical setup with one command.
One-command onboarding and drift detection — new hires productive in minutes; "works on my machine" retired for good.
Priority support and a commercial license.
We wanted the path from "I'll take it" to "it's working" to be as short as Grove itself. It's three steps.
1. Buy — no account needed. Pick your number of seats on the Grove page and check out. Grove Pro is $99 per seat, per year — buy as many as your team needs, expand any time.
2. Get your license by email. The moment your payment clears, we create your account and send a single, friendly email with your license key and your login. Nothing to sign up for first — the account is born from the purchase.
3. Activate. Paste the key into Grove under Settings → License, or from your terminal:
$ grove license activate GROVE-eyJ2Ijoxrf…
✓ Grove Teams active
seats : 4
email : you@yourteam.com
renews : in 364 days
That's it. Check it any time:
$ grove license status
✓ Grove Teams active
seats : 4
email : you@yourteam.com
renews : in 358 days
And here's a detail we care about: verification is offline. Your license is signed with a key we hold, and Grove checks it against a public key baked into the app — no phone-home, no license server your workflow depends on. Get on a plane, lose your Wi-Fi; your Pro features keep working. There's a gentle online check for renewals with a long grace period, but your daily work never waits on it.
Bought three seats and grew to eight? Log into your portal, hit Manage billing & seats, and change the number — Stripe handles the proration, and Grove re-issues your key automatically. Your license key, renewal date, and download links all live in one place.
Three honest reasons.
It pays for itself the first time you onboard someone. A new teammate running your exact stack — right PHP, databases up, secrets in place, dev server humming — from a single grove up is worth more than $99 the first afternoon it saves.
It replaces a pile of half-measures. The shared 1Password note for .env. The stale "Local Setup" section in the README. The Slack thread titled "why won't this run." Grove Pro folds those into the tool that already runs your environment.
It keeps the ecosystem honest. Grove's free core is genuinely free and open — no asterisks. Pro is what funds that promise. If Grove saves you time, a Pro seat keeps it independent and moving.
$ grove license activate YOUR-KEY
Grab Grove (free) at elyracode.com/grove, and when your team is ready, Pro is one purchase and one command away. Solo developers keep everything, forever. Teams get the layer that makes local dev shared — secure, reproducible, and onboarding-in-a-minute.
Thanks for building on Grove. We're just getting started. 🌱🌳
Under the hood: licenses are Ed25519-signed and verified entirely offline, the free core is never gated, and team secrets are end-to-end encrypted with the age recipients model — the server only ever sees ciphertext. More on that architecture soon.