Portability

Hosted ggui runs the same protocol you can run yourself. There is no hosted-only dialect, no proprietary client library, and no lock-in step you would have to unwind later. If hosted ggui stops suiting you, you point your agent at your own server and keep going.

What moves unchanged

• Your agent. It talks to an MCP endpoint. Change the URL and the credential; nothing else. There is no client SDK wrapper to swap out, because your agent never imported one.
• Your contracts. DataContract is protocol, not product. The same propsSpec / actionSpec / contextSpec shapes are accepted by both sides, and the conformance kit is what settles any disagreement.
• Your blueprints. Cached blueprints are exportable artefacts. ggui export-pool writes a pool you load on another server with ggui serve --seed-pool <dir>, so the work of generating them travels with you.
• Your gadgets. Published gadgets are content-addressed, signed bundles installed by manifest. They resolve the same way on either side.

What differs

	Hosted	Your own server
Model access	ggui’s credit pool, or your own provider key	Always your own provider key
Billing	Prepaid credits, priced per render	Your provider’s bill, directly
Registry endpoint	The hosted marketplace	The hosted marketplace, or your own registry

Credentials do not carry over in either direction: a ggui_user_* connector key is meaningless to a server you run, and a self-hosted key is meaningless to mcp.ggui.ai. That is the boundary working correctly, not a migration cost.

Going self-hosted

Start with the self-hosted quickstart — it runs the whole stack locally with no account. When you are ready to put it somewhere, the reference deploys cover the shapes that are known to work.