Hydrate Pro — upgrade from Free

After this page: your licence is activated, Hydration Packs are available for import/export, and /hydrate-last returns a richer briefing via the Opus→Sonnet handoff workflow.

Install

Hydrate ships as a single Homebrew formula (or MSI for Windows: see /install/). hydrate setup handles everything: it mints your user id, wires hooks for every coding-agent runtime detected on this machine (Claude Code, Codex CLI / App, Mistral Vibe), and offers to install the local semantic embedder.

brew install getHydrate/hydrate/hydrate
hydrate setup

On a clean install hydrate setup stamps the tier as Free. The next section swaps that for your Pro licence.

Prerequisite: a Pro licence key

Pro keys start with hyd-lic-. Get one at gethydrate.dev/pricing, or register during the beta to lock in $5/mo forever:

hydrate register --edition=pro --email=you@example.com

Registration emails the key within a few seconds. Pro keys issued during the beta are rate-locked even if you lapse and reactivate years later.

Activate your Pro licence

After hydrate setup, run:

hydrate license activate <your-licence-key>

This swaps the auto-minted UUID at ~/.hydrate/user for your canonical Pro user id, so every machine you run this on rolls up to the same account in the dashboard. The previous id is preserved at ~/.hydrate/user.bak if you need to roll back.

hydrate doctor will now show tier: Pro (expires <date>).

What Pro unlocks

Hydration Packs

Packs are portable bundles of a project's canon, facts, and working memory. Share them as files or import them from teammates.

# Export your project's memory
hydrate pack create --project=my-project --name="sprint-12 state"

# Inspect before importing
hydrate pack inspect sprint-12-state.hpack

# Import (dry run first)
hydrate pack import sprint-12-state.hpack --dry-run
hydrate pack import sprint-12-state.hpack

Opus→Sonnet handoff workflow

Pro unlocks the /hydrate-last enhanced mode: when you start a session on a complex project, the briefing uses an Opus consolidation pass to surface the three most load-bearing decisions from prior sessions, then hands off to Sonnet for the rest of the session. This costs one Opus call per session start, billed against your Anthropic account. To opt out of the Opus pass:

hydrate config set briefing.use_opus=false

Plan tier controls

Pro users can set a budget tier for token generation:

hydrate plan show               # current tier
hydrate plan set --tier=pro     # or: max-5x, max-20x, payg

payg is pay-as-you-go — no monthly ceiling, billed per token. The default (pro) caps generation at the Pro monthly allowance.

Embedder

Pro uses the same bundled MiniLM embedder as Free. If you haven't already run hydrate setup-embedder during the Free install, run it now: see /install/free#embedder for the one-line install + the platforms covered today.

Verify

hydrate doctor

The License: Pro line confirms activation. Then try creating a test pack:

hydrate pack create --project=default --name="test pack" --out=/tmp/test.hpack
hydrate pack inspect /tmp/test.hpack

You should see the pack metadata and a fact/canon count. Remove it when done:

rm /tmp/test.hpack

What changed on your machine

No other files change at activation time.

Troubleshooting

Next steps

• Team install — share project memory with teammates
• Enterprise install — join an organisation's Hydrate server
• Claude Code integration — hook details and advanced flags