Software is heavy now.

The version-control systems developers love were built for text — diffs, merges, lines. But the most valuable work today is anything but text. It's game worlds and Unreal levels, film frames and geometry caches, model weights and labelled datasets. It's measured in gigabytes and terabytes, and it's made by artists, designers and researchers as much as by programmers.

Git fumbles those files. Git LFS taxes them — pointers, quotas, a bandwidth meter that ticks every time someone pulls. Perforce gates them behind a per-seat licence and a server somebody has to babysit. And the people who make most of that heavy work — the artists — get the worst seat at the table, on tools they were never designed for.

The heaviest, most valuable work has the worst version control. We think that's backwards.

A home for heavy work

Pako is built for exactly the files everyone else treats as an exception: native big-file storage, exclusive locking so two people never clobber the same asset, previews you can actually open, and a checkout that pulls only what a revision needs. And bandwidth we simply refuse to charge for — because metered egress is the thing that makes a real free tier impossible for everyone else.

Independent, on purpose

No hyperscaler owns us. No AI assistant ships in your sidebar uninvited, training on your prompts because a quarterly target said so. We answer to the teams who use Pako, and to no one else. Your data is yours — to keep, to export, to take with you.

The bet

The next decade of creative software is heavier and more collaborative. We're building the version control for that world — and we'd like you to make something heavy on it.