Conductor joins Meta and sets a November 20 cloud shutdown Conductor joins Meta and sets a November 20 cloud shutdown

The transition has already closed the front door. New users can no longer register or download the app, and existing free users cannot upgrade. Current Pro users retain their paid features without charge. Active subscribers will receive refunds. During the read-only period, users can inspect old chats and export their data, while new messages stop. Cloud data deletion begins with the shutdown. The local application has a longer runway, with new models and critical fixes continuing until early 2027. The local app starts winding down then too. Conductor hopes to offer a replacement.

A workspace is more than a model

Conductor’s March 30 company update described its original product as a way to coordinate several coding agents on a MacBook. Each agent worked in an isolated copy of the codebase. Developers could inspect the changes and merge the results, without several agents writing into the same working files. That arrangement put the application between the developer, the repository and the agents doing the work. The interface organized parallel tasks and their review. Moving away from it therefore changes the place where work is coordinated, even when the underlying coding agent remains familiar.

What the hosted service supplied

The July 30 cloud launch moved that work into isolated microVMs with repositories and dependencies already installed. Agents could continue while a laptop was closed. Shared workspace links let teammates see activity and prompt agents together. An accompanying API could create workspaces, send prompts and read replies, giving teams a way to build their own interfaces or start tasks from bots. Those capabilities explain why copying a repository is only part of replacing the service. A working replacement also needs somewhere to run the application, the dependencies that make its tests meaningful and the integrations that start or observe agent work.

An alternative has to run the project

Boxes.dev responded on November 4 with a migration offer and a different environment model. It says a prepared Template box holds the application, tools, databases and services, then becomes the snapshot copied for each task. Its migration guide separates the initial environment setup from startup commands run on each new devbox. It also calls for preserving install scripts, repository setup commands and environment requirements. That is a useful distinction for the transition: saving code preserves the project, while reproducing its execution environment determines whether an agent can actually build and test it elsewhere.