Temporal makes long-running code survive failure. Workflows hold the business logic, Activities wrap the operations that can fail with automatic retries, and the Temporal Service persists state at every step so a process resumes from precisely where it stopped rather than starting again or ending in a half-finished state.
This is infrastructure that agent systems specifically need, which is why OpenAI, Cursor, Replit, Lovable and Retool appear as users. An agent doing forty minutes of work across a dozen tool calls will hit a timeout, a rate limit or a crash, and without durable execution that run is simply lost. Human-in-the-loop orchestration and the saga pattern are first-class rather than bolted on.
It is 100% open source under MIT with nine years in production, from people who built AWS SQS, SWF and Azure Durable Functions, and Temporal Cloud offers $1,000 in credits to start. Cloud tier pricing is not detailed. Durable execution is a genuine shift in how you write code rather than a library you add, self-hosting the service is real operational work, and the learning curve is the honest cost.
