Hi, one of the Unison creators here. The Unison language is open source (MIT licensed) and there's an open source library ecosystem (see https://share.unison-lang.org/) like most languages. If you just want to run some Unison code on a VM then that's free and works like any other language. You can do this today (we do this ourselves for the implementation of Unison Cloud!). There's also a local single machine interpreter of the cloud API for easy local testing.
The "real" cloud platform providing the fancy distributed compute and storage fabric, deployment with a function call, etc, isn't open source - selling this product in various forms is how we are sustainable as a business.
If you're at a company and want to deploy "Unison Cloud in a box" on your own infra or in your own VPC then that's something that's doable and I'd love to talk more - feel free to email hello@unison.cloud.
If you're just an individual wanting to do cloud stuff at small scale on your own infra, that's probably harder for us to support right now. I'd recommend just using the free tier or starter tier of our public cloud. Even if we had some sort of free self-hosting option for cloud, there's economies of scale you'd miss out on so it could easily be more expensive anyway!
Not to mention, time is valuable https://www.unison-lang.org/blog/developer-productivity-real... We've built a nicely managed public cloud that eliminates huge swaths of tedious work. If you're happy to pay for that, then it's a good fit. If you prefer to self-host all the things, even for personal-use scale, then I totally understand that but Unison Cloud probably isn't the best fit right now.
I would even pay a few bucks (one time, not a subscription) to license this software for use. I would love to use Unison for my personal projects, but I'm not about to get locked-in to something, I'd rather build something myself that was worse than this than get locked in for personal projects. I know it has a free tier now, but in the future that may not exist.
Since this announcement is about Unison Cloud, it might not be clear for people who aren't familiar with the Unison language that you can run Unison programs without Unison Cloud. So much like just about any other language you can put a Unison program in a Docker container, deploy it via AWS Lambda, etc. Unison Cloud is kind of an "easy mode" for scalable and distributed deployment with support for typed durable storage, the option to expose public HTTP/websocket endpoints, etc.
