Local Guard vs Guard Cloud

Guard protects your machine first. Guard Cloud is an optional paid service providing cloud history, visibility, sync, and management around that protection.

Local Guard baseline

Available without a Cloud subscription or sign-in:

• Launch interception and wrappers — hol-guard install and hol-guard run sit in front of supported AI harnesses before tools, MCP servers, or skills execute.
• Local policy decisions — home config, project overrides, saved allow/deny rules, and built-in recommendations resolve on this machine. Saved local decisions are verified against Guard-managed integrity key material before they become authoritative again.
• Local blocking and warnings — Guard can stop or warn on supported risky shell commands, file reads, MCP tool calls, skill loads, and prompt-sensitive actions before side effects occur.
• Package-manager protection where supported — supported managers (for example npm and PyPI) can be intercepted locally through shims and runtime evaluation. Unsupported or monitor-only managers stay advisory only.
• Local receipts and explain output — hol-guard receipts, hol-guard explain, and the local approval center record what Guard decided and why.
• Local approval and review paths — inline harness approval, the local approval center on 127.0.0.1, and hol-guard approvals resolve decisions without Cloud.
• Local policy integrity tooling — hol-guard policies verify, integrity-status, migrate-local-integrity, and repair --clear-invalid let an operator detect unsigned, unknown-key, or tampered local policy rows and move to enforce mode deliberately.
• Cloud-outage independence — if Guard Cloud is unavailable, you are signed out, your trial ends, a subscription is past due or canceled, or you never connected, local interception, policy, blocking, receipts, and approvals continue on the machine.

Guard does not meter local safety features. You can detect harnesses, install launchers, diff changes, prompt for approval, and inspect receipts without signing in.

Safe Decode runs locally too. It inspects encoded payload layers for review evidence, but never executes decoded payloads and only syncs redacted summaries when optional Cloud receipt sync is enabled.

Guard Cloud for individual developers

Guard Cloud is a personal AI safety cockpit and memory layer. It does not gate baseline local protection.

Solo

Solo is the personal continuity tier for one developer. It adds Cloud value without changing what Guard can protect locally:

• Cloud receipt and decision-memory sync for two Cloud-connected devices
• 30 days of searchable Cloud history
• 1 GB of Cloud storage
• basic history search
• a weekly personal security digest
• matched critical advisory email
• individual receipt download and a retained-history basic CSV/JSON export

The two-device limit is a Cloud-sync limit only. A third machine still installs, intercepts, prompts, blocks, and writes local receipts normally. If the Portal returns device_limit_reached or cloud_sync_paused_plan_limit, the client must report Cloud sync as limited while continuing to report local protection accurately.

Pro

Pro remains the personal power-user tier. Portal-provided entitlements are the source of truth, but the product boundary includes longer history and storage, all supported personal-device Cloud continuity subject to the current service policy, real-time alerting, policy version history, advanced search, and full evidence export. The local client does not hardcode plan prices or use plan names as enforcement logic.

Cloud error contract

Cloud clients consume machine-actionable plan errors rather than parsing human messages. Known normal plan boundaries include:

• feature_not_in_plan
• device_limit_reached
• retention_limit_reached
• storage_limit_reached
• subscription_past_due
• trial_expired
• cloud_sync_paused_plan_limit

These codes describe Cloud state only. A network outage, billing state, trial state, retention limit, storage limit, or device limit must never be translated into “protection expired,” “device blocked,” or another claim that local Guard stopped working.

Optional Cloud pairing commands:

hol-guard connect
hol-guard connect status
hol-guard connect repair
hol-guard sync
hol-guard supply-chain sync

hol-guard connect is the canonical way to pair a machine with Guard Cloud. hol-guard connect --headless uses OAuth Device Code for SSH/CI hosts. hol-guard login remains only as a redirecting compatibility alias. These commands add sync and visibility; they do not unlock core local protection.

Pairing also does not authorize Cloud commands on the device. That channel is off by default and separate from read-only synchronization. Inspect its status or opt into the read-only operation set explicitly:

hol-guard commands status
hol-guard commands enable --operations read-only
hol-guard daemon repair

Capabilities are signed, device/workspace-bound, limited to exact operations, and expire. State-changing jobs remain paused for one-job local approval. Use hol-guard commands revoke --confirm revoke to disable commands immediately without disconnecting Cloud sync. See the full Cloud command capability contract.

Guard Cloud for teams

Team plans add shared ownership, routing, RBAC, billing, and evidence exports on top of the individual Cloud value:

• Shared workspaces with members, roles, service principals, and ownership
• Shared review workflow with assignment, SLA, policy memory, cases, and audit history
• Integrations — Slack, GitHub, Jira, PagerDuty, email, and webhooks where setup and delivery are available
• Team package firewall visibility and exception governance
• Billing, plan limits, admin controls, exports, and enterprise materials

Quick comparison

Capability	Local Guard	Solo Cloud	Pro Cloud	Team Cloud
Launch interception and local policy	Included	Included	Included	Included
Local blocking/warnings on supported actions	Included	Included	Included	Included
Local receipts and approvals	Included	Included	Included	Included
Works when Cloud is offline	Yes	Local protection continues; sync pauses	Local protection continues; sync pauses	Local protection continues; sync pauses
Cloud-connected personal devices	None required	2	Portal entitlement	Managed by workspace
Cloud history	None required	30 days	Portal entitlement	Workspace policy
Decision memory across machines	No	Included	Included	Included
Real-time Cloud activity alerts	No	Not included	Portal entitlement	Team routing
Full evidence bundles	Local export only	Not included	Portal entitlement	Team evidence
Team RBAC, routing, and shared policy	No	No	No	Included

Related docs

• Get started
• Harness support
• Remediation