Is Rex Terminal Free? Beta Access, Pricing, and License

Is Rex terminal free?

Yes, for now. Rex, the new terminal from Superlogical (the company started by Ghostty creator Mitchell Hashimoto), is free during its beta and does not require an account. But it is invite-only, so you have to join a waitlist on superlogical.com first. The beta client runs on macOS only. There is no official pricing, and Rex has not been confirmed as open source. A claim that it will "always be free" comes from a single unofficial source.

What is Rex, and who makes it?

Rex is a terminal and a multiplexer in one app. A terminal is the program where you type commands. A multiplexer, like the well-known tmux, keeps your sessions alive when you close the window. Rex combines the two. A background server owns your shells and processes, and the Rex app is a client that connects to it. Quit the app, and your programs keep running. Open it again, and it reattaches.

It comes from Superlogical, a company founded by Mitchell Hashimoto. He is known for creating Ghostty, and before that Vagrant and Terraform.

Rex is not Ghostty renamed. Ghostty is a nonprofit project and stays as it is. Rex is a separate commercial product that shares an engine with it: libghostty, the MIT-licensed library behind Ghostty's rendering and terminal emulation. That is why text rendering and terminal behavior should feel familiar to Ghostty users.

How do you get into the Rex beta?

Join the waitlist at superlogical.com. There is no public way to skip the line, and Superlogical has not published how invites are handed out or how long the wait is. Don't assume a particular timeline.

Once you get in, you download a Mac app. In the review this article draws on, it installed as "Rex beta" and showed version 0.1.0. That tells you how early this is.

A few practical notes for the waiting period:

1. Sign up with an address you check. An invite is only useful if you see it.
2. Don't expect to need an account. The beta is reported as free with no account needed.
3. Plan to install it next to your current terminal. Rex is not something to switch to wholesale on day one.

What platforms does Rex support?

Right now, only macOS has a client you can use. The server component also exists for Linux and Windows, and early clients for those platforms are in the works. No dates have been given, so a Linux or Windows user can't plan around it yet.

This matters for teams. If your colleagues are split between Mac, Windows and Linux, you can't standardize on Rex today. A single Mac user can try it, but a shared team workflow can't depend on it.

Will Rex always be free?

Nobody can say yet. Here is what is known and what is not.

Rex is described as a commercial product, which is different from Ghostty's nonprofit model. That points toward some kind of paid offering eventually, but nothing in the public record says what it would look like. It could be a paid tier, a team plan, or something else. Don't guess, and don't build a budget around any of those.

A sensible way to treat it: use it freely while it is free, and don't make it a hard dependency until pricing is published.

Is Rex open source?

This is the least clear of the three questions. What is known:

• libghostty, the library Rex builds on, is MIT licensed. MIT is a permissive license that lets people use, modify and redistribute code with few conditions.
• Superlogical has said it is building on libghostty and might release open-source pieces along the way.
• Nobody has said Rex itself is open source.

The MIT license on the underlying library does not make Rex open source. A commercial product can be built on a permissively licensed library and still be closed. So for now, assume Rex is a proprietary app that may contribute some open-source parts.

Why care? If you work in an organization with rules about which software you can install, the license often decides whether you need approval. Open-source status also affects whether you can inspect the code, whether the community can keep it alive if the company changes direction, and how safe it is to build scripts around. Treat this as the question to get answered before moving your workflow over.

Should you join the Rex waitlist?

It costs nothing to join, so the better question is whether you should invest time once you're in.

It is worth your time if you spend your day in a terminal, run coding agents, have lost a long-running job by closing a window, or already live in tmux. The persistent sessions are the main draw, and the command line interface is built so scripts and coding agents can drive the app.

You can skip it for now if you're happy with your current terminal and multiplexer, you work on Windows or Linux, or you can't run unfinished software on a work machine.

Some honest limits to know about before you commit:

• It is a very early beta, so commands can change and things can break.
• If you use tmux, your configuration doesn't carry over, and some tmux options are missing.
• A computer restart still kills your processes. The server keeps things alive when you close the app, but a reboot ends them. One reviewer went back to another tool because their agent sessions didn't survive a restart.
• Hosts added from the command line don't yet show up in the app.

What does this mean for you?

If you're an individual developer or a technical analyst on a Mac: Join the waitlist now. When an invite arrives, install Rex alongside your current terminal and use it for long-running work, like agent sessions, where persistence helps. Keep everything else where it is.

If you manage a team: Don't plan around Rex yet. There is no Windows or Linux client, no pricing, and no license answer. Revisit when Superlogical announces monetization or clarifies its licensing.

If you work somewhere with software approval rules: Check with your IT or security team before installing a beta app on a work machine, even a free one. The missing license information is the thing they will ask about first.

If you're not a terminal user at all: Nothing here requires action. It's a tool for people who already work in a command line.

How can you keep track of beta tools your team is testing?

Waitlists, free betas and unannounced pricing add up fast. If you're testing several tools at once, a shared tracker with columns for access status, platform, cost, license and a review-by date beats a scattered spreadsheet. With Remy, you can describe that tracker in plain English (including a request form for colleagues who want a tool evaluated, and a view of which ones need a pricing recheck) and get a deployed app with sign-in and a database, which you own as standard TypeScript in a git repository.