Is the free version crippled?
No, and there is no other version. The analyzer, the CLI, the diff engine and the Watch monitor are all in the public repository under Apache-2.0, and they always will be. There is nothing held back to sell you later.
Do you host it for me?
No. Sentinel is single-tenant by design — you deploy it, you hold the data, and nothing passes through us. The Cloudflare version takes an afternoon; the GitHub Actions version needs no server at all.
What is this actually for?
Catching the release where a package you already trusted becomes something else — a new install script, a widened schema, a rewritten tool description your model reads as an instruction. Sentinel cannot stop that release. It makes it visible, with evidence, before you upgrade.
Does Sentinel tell me a package is safe?
No, and it will not pretend to. It produces evidence about what an artifact declares; you set the policy. We publish exactly where extraction fails — including that across a pinned corpus of 50 real published MCP servers, 37 yield a usable tool inventory and only 12 can be resolved completely.
Does that third-of-servers figure limit the change detection?
Barely. A package turning hostile shows up in the artifact digest, the install scripts, the dependencies and the file inventory — all recorded completely, on every package, every time. The inference limit applies to naming tools, not to noticing that something moved.
What does it actually catch, reliably?
Change. Artifact digest, file inventory, dependencies, install scripts and entrypoints are recorded completely on every package. If something you approved has moved, you will know. Tool-surface extraction is inference and is stated as a lower bound.
Does it run the package?
Never. Analysis is entirely static — nothing is executed, imported, or started. That is a deliberate limit: a package can do things at runtime that no report mentions.
Do you see my code or credentials?
Neither. Sentinel inspects public npm artifacts by name and version. It never accepts credentials, and hosted monitoring only ever needs to know which public packages you care about.
Why should I trust a small lab with this?
You should not have to. The analyzer is open, the reports are schema-validated and reproducible from a digest, and the limitations are published in the repository rather than discovered later. Verify the tool rather than trusting us.