A Cordango app is not meant to be trapped inside Cordango. It is a definition, one portable file, and that file has two destinations: the platform, where it runs with your people and permissions, or a conventional application you build from it and own outright.
A Cordango application is a definition rather than a codebase. One portable file holding the data model and its relationships, the business logic, the workflows, the screens, the roles and the permissions. Your company records are not in it. Those stay yours and stay where they are.
That is the duller and more important half of portability. Because the app is a document, it can be exported, reviewed, versioned and installed somewhere else without losing anything, and it is never trapped inside whoever built it.
cordango build turns the same definition into a conventional application: ASP.NET Core and EF Core on the back, Vue on the front, a Dockerfile and migrations you can read, and no dependency on us. Delete the toolchain afterwards and it still builds.
There is no licence server, no account and no phone home in what it writes. It is your code from the moment it exists, which is what portability has to mean if the word is going to mean anything.
The line is drawn by job, not by feature. Everything you need to write an application and check it is open. The platform that runs it for you is not.
Apache-2.0. The file you own is described by a schema you can read, fork and validate against.
Apache-2.0. The same compiler the platform uses, so what checks on your laptop is what runs on Cordango.
Apache-2.0. cordango check runs with no account and no connection.
Apache-2.0. The part that writes the ASP.NET Core and Vue application from the definition.
Not open source. The hosted runtime, the shared company model and the governance are the product. We would rather write that here than let it be inferred.
Calling it that would be a stretch. Open toolchain, proprietary platform, and the boundary is deliberate.
The generator refuses to build rather than quietly shipping less than your definition asked for. Workflows, computed fields and command guards are still on that refusal list today. An app that uses them runs on Cordango and does not yet build standalone.
We say that here because a portability promise with a footnote nobody reads is worse than none. The roadmap tracks each item, and the boundary moves as they land.
Ready-made apps from operators, consultants and other Cordango companies. Somebody who runs a haulage firm has thought harder about your delivery workflow than a product manager ever will, and a portable definition is what lets them hand it over.
The App Library →Creators do not set prices or sell their own plans, so you never assemble a bill out of eleven vendors. Cordango rewards them when other companies genuinely use what they built.
Watch an app get generated in the demo, then take the definition home and run cordango check on it yourself.