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Accounts, plans and entitlements

Nodeau runs completely without an account. Signing in adds an account association, a registered installation and a signed entitlement — which is how a paid plan reaches a machine.

Nodeau without an account#

Local inference, the model catalog, batch's local half, the dashboard, artifact verification, admission and safe scheduling all work with no connection to Nodeau Cloud at all, and none of them will ask for one.

An installation with no entitlement runs the free Home plan. Nothing that protects you is disabled: admission, artifact verification, authentication and every integrity check are identical on every plan.

Two different credentials#

This is the distinction most worth getting right, because the two live in different security domains.

Signing in to Nodeau Cloud does not change your API key, and rotating your API key does not touch your account.

The local API key#

nodeau auth show            # print it, creating one on first use
nodeau auth show --quiet    # only the key, nothing on stderr
nodeau auth rotate          # replace it

It is generated with a CSPRNG on first use and stored 0600. It never leaves the machine: there is no server to register it with and nothing to log in to.

auth show prints your local key, which is not automatically the key any particular service enforces — that depends on which Secret the service references.

nodeau auth token qwen-local    # the token that service will actually accept
nodeau auth publish qwen-local  # make your local key the one it enforces

auth publish restarts the workload, because the model server reads its key file once at startup. Expect a short gap while the model reloads.

After auth rotate, every saved curl command and SDK configuration using the old key stops working immediately, and a running service keeps enforcing the key it started with until it restarts:

nodeau auth publish qwen-local   # or: nodeau restart qwen-local

The endpoint itself does not need restarting — it forwards whatever Authorization header it receives and never reads the key file.

Signing in#

nodeau login

You are never asked to paste a token. Nodeau shows a short code, you approve it in a browser you are already signed in to, and this machine receives its own credential directly.

Signing in gives you:

• an account association,
• a registered installation,
• a signed entitlement, which is how a paid plan reaches the machine.

nodeau logout

Removes the account link. It does not stop anything: inference, batch and every local capability keep working, on the free Home plan. It is a local operation — the installation still exists in your Nodeau account until you remove it there, which is deliberate: a machine that has lost its network connection must still be able to unlink itself.

Plans#

nodeau plan show
nodeau plan show --json

Nodeau Home Pro
  Make all my GPUs work together.

  status        valid
  refreshed     2026-09-22 03:14 UTC (automatic)

Limits
  LIMIT                  ALLOWED
  MaxNodes               3
  MaxGPUs                2
  MaxGPUsPerMachine      2
  MaxUsers               1
  MaxConcurrentServices  unlimited
  MaxBatchJobs           unlimited

Seeing your machines from a browser is free on every plan; changing one from there is what a paid plan buys.

Home Pro is on sale. Business is priced per organisation and the way to it is contact — there is no self-service checkout, by design.

Capabilities Nodeau has named and not built#

nodeau plan show lists these under Coming soon: scheduled batch, priority queues, model replication across machines, team RBAC, SSO and audit as a plan difference. No plan grants them until they exist — a signed entitlement is the one place the product cannot later disown a claim, so nothing is granted on a promise.

How an entitlement works#

An entitlement is a signed statement of what an installation may do, verified offline against keys compiled into the binary. Nothing is asked of Nodeau Cloud at verification time, so a network outage cannot change what your hardware is allowed to do.

It carries the features and limits themselves, not a plan name — so an installation that has not updated cannot have what it is entitled to change retroactively when the plan table moves. The plan id rides along for display.

Refreshing#

nodeau plan refresh

Run it after changing plan, and to renew before the current entitlement expires. It asks Nodeau Cloud for a freshly signed entitlement, checks the signature, and stores it only if it verifies.

An installation that has been set up also refreshes on a timer, roughly every six hours with jitter.

Expiry and grace#

A signed entitlement is current for about a month, with a further couple of weeks of grace. Nothing stops working the moment it expires.

nodeau doctor reports PLAN_REFRESH_STALLED when an installation is linked to an account and has stopped learning what that account entitles it to — which is the condition that precedes a surprise, and the one you want to see early.

A machine with no internet#

# on a machine that can reach api.nodeau.ai
nodeau plan export -o entitlement.txt

# carry the file across, then on the offline machine
nodeau plan import entitlement.txt

The file holds exactly the bytes Nodeau Cloud signed. It goes through exactly the same checks a fetched entitlement does — the signature against keys compiled into the binary, the installation and organisation it names against this machine's, and an entitlement older than the one already held is refused. An entitlement carried on a stick is never less verified than one fetched.

The entitlement names the installation and organisation it was issued for, so a file exported from one machine is not a licence another machine can use. This is a way to deliver an entitlement without a network, not a way to copy one.

Nothing secret is in the file. An entitlement is a signed public claim about what a plan allows — it is not a credential, it cannot be used to sign in, and it gives nobody access to an account.

There is also nodeau plan set --from-file, for a token issued to you out of band. The token is read from a file or stdin, never from a command-line argument, so it does not reach your shell history or the process list.

When a plan changes#

A change reaches a machine when nodeau plan refresh runs — from the timer, or because you ran it. Until then the machine keeps the entitlement it has.

Lowering a plan never stops a running workload. The new entitlement decides what may start.

What an account adds beyond entitlements#

Signing in and connecting a fleet gives you app.nodeau.ai: your machines, what is running on them, and — with FeatureRemoteManagement — the ability to operate them from a browser.

Three things live there rather than in the CLI.

What your hardware has been doing#

Nodeau can tell you which workloads held which accelerators, for how long, added up across the machines you own.

The figure is accelerator-time taken from the scheduler's own record of what was reserved — not sampled from the cards. There is no GPU-utilisation measurement behind it, and none is claimed.

If you tell Nodeau what an accelerator-hour is worth to you, it multiplies your number by what it measured. Until you do, it shows nothing at all.

This is not billing. Nodeau does not meter, invoice or charge anything, does not know what power, hardware or a cloud instance costs, and never produces an amount due.

What changed, and who changed it#

Your organisation can see what changed and who changed it — including what was refused, which is the event an investigation usually starts from. Kept for a year.

It records the action, the actor and the outcome. It does not record a key, a token, a prompt, a reply, or the contents of anything you computed.

It is an append-oriented table with no delete route. That is not the same as a tamper-evident or cryptographically immutable log, and Nodeau does not describe it as one.

Which build your fleet should be on#

You can record which build your fleet should be on, and see which build it is on. A channel only ever moves forward.

You can also say when Nodeau may act on your machines on its own, in your own time zone.

None of this is qualified on Apple Silicon: a Mac runs standalone and cannot join a fleet, usage travels as a fleet report, and audit is a hosted surface.

Removing an installation#

From app.nodeau.ai, or by running nodeau logout on the machine. The two do different halves: logout removes the local link, the console removes the account-side record and frees the slot.

What Nodeau Cloud cannot do#

• It cannot reproduce a credential it issued. Only a SHA-256 is stored.
• It cannot initiate a connection to your machine. There is no inbound port, no callback and no remote shell.
• It cannot see what you compute. Prompts, completions, embeddings, images and batch records never leave your hardware.

See security and privacy.

Documentation for the current published build, the beta channel. Something here wrong or missing? Tell us — a report from a machine we have never seen is the most useful thing we get.