Free forever. Here is exactly what that means.

Five commitments.

1. The specification is free. Read it, implement it, extend it, and ship products on it. No fee, no registration, no royalty.
2. The reference CLI is open source. Building, serving, inspecting, signing, and packing are all in it. There is no paid edition with the good parts.
3. Your files are yours. No account and no API key. The CLI makes no network calls outside your machine, and the server binds 127.0.0.1.
4. Files open without us. A .tome is a ZIP and an SQLite database. If this project disappeared tomorrow, your files would still open.
5. Old files keep opening. A change that an existing reader would misread gets a new version number, and readers for version 1.3 stay valid for version 1.3 files.

Read a file with tools you already have.

No Tomefile code below, just unzip and sqlite3:

$ unzip handbook.tome knowledge/vectors.db
$ sqlite3 knowledge/vectors.db \
  "SELECT source, substr(replace(text, char(10), ' '), 1, 44) FROM chunks;"
kitchen.txt|Northwind kitchen  The coffee machine is on
leave.md|# Leave  Full-time staff at Northwind get 18
onboarding.md|# First day  Start at 9:30. Collect a badge

Searching the vectors needs the sqlite-vec extension and the embedder from the file. An independent reader that does it, with no Tomefile code, is 83 lines of Python.

What is public.

The specification is SPECS.md. The reference CLI is the same repository. There is no paid edition of either. A LICENSE file will ship with the first tagged release; until then, do not assume a specific SPDX identifier. Your .tome files are yours. You choose the knowledge license and write it into the manifest.

If anything is ever paid.

It will be a service around files, such as hosting revisions for publishers or private distribution inside a company. Never the format, never the reader, never the CLI. Anything that is free today stays free.

A standard needs a second implementation.

The format becomes a standard when tools other than ours read and write the same bytes. If you maintain a RAG tool, a chat app, or a vector library, implement the seven conformance rules and tell us in an issue. Changes to the format are proposed there too, in public.