The half they rent you, and the half that is yours

For most of its life the front page of this tool sold a fuel gauge. Here are your accounts, here is which one still has quota, here is how to hop to the next one. That is a real problem and people really have it.

It was also, by then, describing about a fifth of what the thing did. The container had turned out to hold identity rather than quota, and the front page had not noticed. So this release was mostly a rewrite of one page, which is the least interesting kind of work and occasionally the most overdue.

The sentence it settled on is the one I actually believe:

**Your AI work has two halves. One is rented. The other is yours.**

The rented half

The model. Its capability, its speed, its context window, its price, the quota you are allowed this week. You do not own any of it and you never will, and the vendors are in an expensive, undignified, extremely productive war over who gets to rent it to you.

**That war is good news, and you should be positioned to profit from it.** The right response to four labs leapfrogging each other every six weeks is to be able to move — to use whichever one is best at the thing in front of you today, and to switch again in November without ceremony.

Almost nobody is positioned that way, and the reason is not loyalty. It is that moving is expensive for reasons that have nothing to do with the model.

The half that is yours

Here is what does not belong to the vendor, however it is stored:

• **Who you are** — your preferences, your standards, the way you want to be talked to, the corrections you have made a hundred times.
• **What you know** — your accumulated notes about your own projects.
• **Where you left off** — the conversation you were in the middle of when the day ended.
• **What should leave no trace** — the work you want thrown away cleanly afterwards.

None of that is a model capability. All of it is currently sitting inside one vendor's directory, in one vendor's format, and that is what actually makes switching expensive. You are not locked in by the model. You are locked in by nine months of context that would have to be re-typed.

So the tool's job stopped being *rotate your quota* and became *keep your half portable*. Quota rotation is still there. It is now an advanced chapter rather than the headline, which is roughly its true importance.

The bill that came with saying it

If you build something that sits between users and several vendor accounts, you owe them an honest account of where the terms draw the line. So the release shipped a document that quotes the relevant vendor policy language, **with dates**, and says plainly which side of the line each thing is on:

• **Holding different accounts for different purposes** — work and personal, one per client, a bot on its own login — is explicitly fine. Every policy I read says so in as many words.
• **Carrying one task past a usage limit onto a second account** is a grey zone. Not obviously prohibited, not blessed either.

The tool does the first thing enthusiastically and can do the second. So before your first cross-account carry it shows a one-time note saying so, and then never mentions it again — because a warning you cannot dismiss is a warning people learn to click through.

I want to be direct about why this is in the product rather than buried in a FAQ. **A tool that lives in a grey zone owes its users the map, not discovery-by-enforcement-email.** The alternative — let people find out when an account gets flagged — is a decision to keep the ambiguity as long as it is profitable and hand the consequences to someone with less information than you. That is not a legal position. It is just a bad trade you have arranged for someone else.

What "portable" has to mean mechanically

Saying your half should be portable is easy. It constrains the implementation hard:

**No proxy.** The moment your traffic goes through my server, the vendor relationship is mine and you are renting from me instead. There is no server.

**No daemon, no telemetry.** A background process that phones home is a second thing to trust and a second thing that can be taken away.

**Plain text on your disk.** The shared memory store is markdown in a folder. Not because markdown is elegant — because it is the format every engine can already read, that you can grep, that survives the tool being abandoned, and that no vendor can revoke. If this project disappeared tomorrow the store would still be a directory of readable notes on your own machine, and that is the entire test.

**Every line auditable.** It is a few thousand lines of shell. You can read the part that touches your credentials in an afternoon, which is the only form of trustworthiness that does not require trusting me.

Those four are not features. They are what the sentence on the front page costs, and any of them being untrue would make the sentence a marketing claim instead of a description.

The uncomfortable part

The honest version of this position is that the portable half is worth more than the rotation, and the rotation is what people arrive for. The gauge is the hook; the store is the point. I do not think that is a trick — it is just the ordinary shape of noticing what you built after you built it.

But it does mean the most valuable thing here is the least visible thing here: a folder of markdown that does nothing, until the day you want to leave.

The boring footnote

clikae — plain bash, MIT, no proxy, no daemon, no telemetry. The terms document lives in the repo as `docs/terms-and-your-accounts.md`, quoted and dated, so you can check whether it has gone stale rather than taking my word for it.