Everything you need to know about pqcc, piqued.cc, and how they work together.
pqcc is a governance dashboard that turns pqdx state files into a navigable, editable knowledge base. Import a state file and immediately see your milestones, decisions, concerns, actions, sessions, queued work, and notes — with inline editing, visual diff, patch generation, and trust boundary filtering.
piqued.cc is the hosted platform that adds portfolio intelligence and team collaboration on top of pqcc. Same dashboard, in your browser, with cross-project views, team workspaces, and sharing arriving through early access.
pqcc gives you depth in one project. piqued.cc gives you intelligence across all of them. pqcc runs on your machine or internal server with no account required and is completely free. piqued.cc runs in your browser from our infrastructure: the free Solo App needs no account, and signing in is what unlocks Portfolio and the paid plans. With pqcc you work with one project at a time; with piqued.cc you can load all your projects side by side.
pqdx is the open protocol that pqcc implements. It's the schema and file format that makes governance data portable, auditable, and tool-independent. pqdx is licensed under CC-BY-ND 4.0 — an open standard anyone can implement. pqcc is our implementation of it.
With npx pqcc@latest (the local tool): Everything. The complete single-project governance dashboard with no restrictions on features, no time limits, and no account required. Import, navigate, edit, validate, diff, patch, export, trust boundary filtering — all of it. Personal, commercial, educational, government use — all permitted.
With piqued.cc (the hosted platform): The same single-project dashboard, in your browser, on any machine. Your state file stays in the browser today; cloud persistence and sharing arrive with early access. No credit card required.
Yes. Run pqcc on your company's internal network and share it with your team. No seat limit for internal use. An engineering team, a department, or a whole company can use it internally at no cost.
Yes. Using pqcc to govern client projects is fine — your team runs the tool, your team reviews state files. What you can't do is host pqcc as a service for your clients to access directly.
Three, and only three: don't redistribute it, don't offer it as a hosted service to people outside your organization, and don't reverse-engineer it. Everything else is permitted. Full details in the License FAQ.
Forever. We will never retroactively charge for features that are free today. The free tool and the free piqued.cc tier are permanent parts of the product, not a limited trial.
To run it without installing: npx pqcc@latest. It runs the newest release every time.
To install it, pick one tool. pqcc needs Node.js 18 or newer; Homebrew installs Node.js for you.
npm (macOS, Linux, Windows)
Install: npm install -g pqcc@latest. The piqued.cc/install script runs this for you.
Update: run the install again.
Remove: npm uninstall -g pqcc
Homebrew (macOS, Linux)
Install: brew install pqdc/tap/pqcc
Update: brew update && brew upgrade pqcc
Remove: brew uninstall pqcc
Scoop (Windows, in PowerShell. Adding the bucket needs git: scoop install git)
Install: scoop bucket add pqdc https://github.com/pqdc/scoop-bucket, then scoop install pqdc/pqcc
Update: scoop update, then scoop update pqcc
Remove: scoop uninstall pqcc
Use one tool. With two copies installed, pqcc can start the older one.
An older pqcc is installed on your machine. Typing pqcc runs that copy and doesn't check for a newer release, and a bare npx pqcc can run it too. Inside a project that has pqcc in its node_modules, npx runs that project's copy.
Fix: run npx pqcc@latest. It checks for the current release every time, even with an old copy installed. Or update the copy with the tool that installed it:
npm or the piqued.cc/install script: npm install -g pqcc@latest. Remove: npm uninstall -g pqcc.
Homebrew: brew update && brew upgrade pqcc. Remove: brew uninstall pqcc.
Scoop: scoop update, then scoop update pqcc. Remove: scoop uninstall pqcc.
Not sure which tool you used? npm ls -g pqcc, brew list --versions pqcc, and scoop list pqcc each show the copy that tool installed.
Yes, after the first launch. pqcc serves the dashboard from your machine and makes no network calls of its own. npx needs the npm registry once to download it. After that, npx can start it from npm's cache.
Offline, npx retries the registry for a minute or more before it falls back to the cache. To skip the wait, run npx --prefer-offline pqcc@latest. Use that flag only when you're offline: online, it can start an older cached version. To skip npx at launch, install pqcc with npm, Homebrew, or Scoop (how) and run pqcc.
Practitioners managing multiple governed projects who need to see across all of them. You've been using pqcc on individual projects and now you have five, ten, twenty state files. You need a single view that shows what needs attention across the portfolio.
Today: unlimited projects loaded side by side, cross-project references (click a project:ID reference and jump straight to it), and attention signals on every loaded project. Arriving through early access: the portfolio view, cross-project search, a session timeline across projects, milestone tracking across projects, a Trust Center page, and shared project URLs.
$399 per operator per month, with unlimited projects and no client cap. Every tier is free during early access, through December 31, 2026 (we may extend early access; we will never shorten it). Founding practitioners — 42 people we select from early-access users who give feedback and write about the product — get Portfolio at $249 per operator per month, locked for the lifetime of the account. To ask about a founding spot, email contact@piqued-ai.com.
Ask. Email contact@piqued-ai.com and tell us how you run governed projects. We are choosing 42 founding practitioners from early-access users, and it comes with expectations: use the product on real work, give us candid feedback (we'll ask for regular calls while it's rough), and write or talk about it — good or bad. In return you get Portfolio at the founding rate for the lifetime of your account, and first access to what we build next. A few people who prove indispensable will simply get it free for life.
A magic-link sign-in — your email, no password. Signing in unlocks Portfolio (and Team, as it ships) free through December 31, 2026, and lets us send you product news as features land; unsubscribe anytime. If you'd rather not share an email, the Solo App is fully usable with no account and nothing collected.
Yes. Everything is free during early access, through December 31, 2026, so you can see the value before anything is billed. No surprise paywalls — the end date is published here, and the rate you start paying is the rate you keep.
Your data stays. All of it. You drop to single-project view — you can still load any project one at a time, edit, export, and do everything you could before. Portfolio features (cross-project views, search, shared URLs) become unavailable until you resubscribe. We never delete your data on downgrade.
Organizations where multiple practitioners govern the same projects. You have a team — engineers, project managers, leadership — and they need to collaborate on governance, not just view it.
Team adds — all arriving through early access — team workspaces, commenting on decisions and concerns, meeting agenda prep with named audiences, role-based access (viewer, editor, admin), portfolio-wide Trust Center pages with custom branding, access controls on shared views, and org-level governance reporting.
$2,500 per workspace per month at list, with 10 seats included and $50 per month for each additional seat. Team is free during early access, through December 31, 2026. Workspaces that come in through early access (email contact@piqued-ai.com) get Team at $1,500 per workspace per month, locked for the lifetime of the account. There is no founding-practitioner program for Team — the early-access rate is how teams get in early.
That's the plan. A Team workspace includes 10 seats for the people who edit, comment, or manage it; viewers of shared project views won't need a paid seat once sharing ships. We want governance to be visible to everyone — charging for visibility would undermine the mission.
Monthly. Payment is processed by Stripe once billing begins — we never see or store your card details. You can add or remove seats anytime. Proration is automatic — you only pay for what you use.
Team features (workspaces, commenting, role-based access, org reporting) end at the close of the billing period. If you keep a Portfolio subscription you keep the portfolio features; otherwise the account reverts to the free Solo App and you can still load, edit, and export any project one at a time. Your data stays. Your projects stay. We never hold your data hostage.
Yes. For organizations that need custom terms, dedicated support, SLAs, or compliance documentation, contact sales@piqued-ai.com.
We publish a standard Data Processing Agreement (DPA) for GDPR and regulatory compliance at piqued.cc/privacy/dpa (countersigned copies via legal@piqued-ai.com), a subprocessor list updated with 30 days' notice before changes, and a Privacy Policy including GDPR and CCPA sections. SOC 2 is on our roadmap.
Not yet. Passwordless sign-in by magic link is live today; passkeys arrive with early access. SSO through enterprise identity providers (Okta, Azure AD, SAML) is on the roadmap for Team and enterprise customers.
Today, your data stays in your browser — nothing is uploaded to our servers. When cloud features ship, data will be stored in the United States, encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest, on infrastructure listed on our subprocessors page.
The local tool (npx pqcc@latest) runs entirely on your infrastructure. After the first download from npm, it needs no external services. For the full platform experience, piqued.cc is the hosted solution. Dedicated infrastructure for enterprise customers is available — contact sales@piqued-ai.com.
No. We do not use your governance data to train AI models. This is a contractual commitment in our Privacy Policy and DPA, not just a policy statement. Your governance records are yours.
You do. Unambiguously. We claim no ownership interest in your state files, session records, decision records, or any governance content you load.
Always. Your data is standard pqdx YAML — today it never leaves your browser, and the dashboard exports the full file with your edits applied. Use it with any tool that reads pqdx files — including competing tools. When cloud persistence ships, closing your account will keep your data available for export for at least 30 days.
Yes, by design. The pqdx protocol is an open standard. Your governance data works with pqcc, with any tool that implements pqdx, or with a text editor. We built on an open protocol precisely so your data is never locked in.
None today. There is no analytics or tracking code in the product — no third-party analytics, no advertising cookies, no cross-site tracking. If we add first-party, cookie-free usage measurement later, it will be described here and in the Privacy Policy before it ships, and it will never build profiles of individual users.
No. We do not sell personal information or governance data to anyone. We do not share your data with advertisers. We do not display third-party ads in the product.
Not today. pqcc is proprietary with a generous free tier. When our team platform (Collabynt+) launches, we plan to make pqcc's source code publicly available under the Business Source License (BSL 1.1) — readable, verifiable, and converting to Apache 2.0 (fully open source) on the BSL change date, four years after each release.
The companion tools are planned as MIT open source: pqvl — headless state file validation for CI/CD, pqsq — CLI queries against state files, and pqdc — the bundle that installs the full toolkit. Their public repositories are placeholders until release; today pqcc is the only published tool.
Yes. The pqdx protocol specification, schema, and file format are licensed under CC-BY-ND 4.0 — an open standard. Anyone can build tools that read and write pqdx state files. The protocol belongs to the community. pqcc is our implementation of it.
Absolutely. That's the point. Build tools, integrations, plugins, visualizations — anything that reads or writes pqdx state files. The spec is documented at pqdx.dev. If you build something, we'd love to hear about it.
Free tier: community support via GitHub issues at github.com/pqdc/pqdc. Portfolio and Team: priority support via email. Enterprise: dedicated support with SLA — contact sales@piqued-ai.com.
Email security@piqued-ai.com. We take security reports seriously and will acknowledge receipt within 24 hours.
Email legal@piqued-ai.com. Or read the License FAQ for plain-language answers to common questions.
Email privacy@piqued-ai.com. Or read our Privacy Policy.
This FAQ is provided for informational purposes. Last updated September 27, 2026. If there is a conflict between this FAQ and the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, or License, those documents govern.