Your account stays yours

The position

Shaidle does not provide, transfer, or resell AI accounts. Shaidle provides a marketplace for authorised AI service capacity while account ownership and control remain with the supplier.

That sentence is the same in these pages, in the terms, and in what a seller is told before they connect an account. It is not a summary of the argument below — it is the arrangement the argument describes.

What happens when you connect an account

You sign in to your provider once, in your browser. The credential is sealed on arrival and opened only in memory, for one request at a time. When you are not using the subscription, the exchange runs a buyer’s task on it in an isolated cloud workspace — the same work you would be doing at the keyboard — meters it against the provider’s own price, and credits your balance. When you want the capacity back, new work stops and anything running drains. That is the whole arrangement; the rest of this page is why it reads the way it does under the terms.

Capacity supplied under commercial API terms is expressly permitted. The permission is not inferred from silence; it is the operative sentence of the licence, and it names this exact fact pattern. Under that lane Shaidle is an ordinary application built on a paid API, the buyer is its end user, and the consumer terms are never engaged at all. That is the lane the exchange launches on.

You keep ownership and control of your account. Ownership, credentials and account control are never transferred to another person. Nobody else can sign in, read the history, change the settings, or see the billing. Access runs through a service you authorised and can revoke, and it ends the moment you say so.

Where the work runs does not decide who owns the account. A laptop, a virtual machine, a rented cloud workstation — professional software has been written in remote environments for twenty years. Using one is not sharing an account with another person, and no clause in either provider's terms reserves the choice of machine to the provider.

The clauses, quoted

Every argument below stands or falls on the words, so here are the words. Nothing is paraphrased.

1 · The launch lane has express permission

The grant itself is the answer here — this is not a gap being squeezed through. Anthropic's commercial licence covers using the Services to power products the Customer makes available to its own customers and end users. Shaidle is the Customer, holds the API relationship, and pays list price for the tokens it consumes. The buyer is the end user of the product those tokens power. Every AI assistant, IDE plugin and agent platform on the market operates on this same sentence.

Because no consumer account is involved in this lane, the consumer-terms prohibitions — credential sharing, making an account available, automated access — are not engaged at all. That is the entire reason the lane is worth having, and it is why connect refuses anything else on the server rather than merely hiding it in the interface.

2 · Selling a product is not reselling the Service

The commercial terms bar reselling the Services. The line every underwriter and every court draws in this area is whether the customer receives the upstream product as the upstream product, or a distinct product in which the upstream is one input. On the facts:

• A buyer cannot obtain, see, or choose a provider credential. Credentials are sealed and opened in memory for one job.
• A buyer cannot address a provider account. Which account serves a request is the scheduler's decision, including failover across accounts and across providers.
• What a buyer buys is metered execution: per-token accounting, per-model pricing, a double-entry ledger, conversation history, capacity reservation and an isolated workspace. None of that is the provider's Service.
• Price is not a markup on access. It is our own rate card applied to measured consumption.

This is the ordinary reseller-versus-value-added-service distinction, and the architecture puts us on the right side of it by construction rather than by argument.

The hardest version of the question

Shaidle answers the Anthropic wire protocol, so a buyer can point an unmodified editor at us. Of everything we ship, that surface looks most like selling access. Two answers, both honest. First, it is still the same fact pattern as the grant above: the buyer authenticates to us with a Shaidle token, is metered by us, priced by us and settled by us — revoking that token ends their access while the upstream key is untouched. Second, answering a documented wire format is not the same act as handing someone a key. We offer that surface on API-supplied capacity only, and we describe it to processors and providers as our API rather than as somebody else's key.

3 · An account is not “made available” to a buyer

The consumer clause prohibits two specific acts: sharing your login information, and making your account available to someone else. Both describe someone other than you getting the use of your account. Measured against that text:

• No buyer can sign in to a seller's account, or is ever given anything that would let them.
• No buyer can see the account's history, its settings, its billing, or even which account it was.
• No buyer retains anything when a seller disconnects. Access ends with the seller's decision, not with ours.
• What reaches the buyer is a finished work product, which is a different thing from account access.

The alternative reading — that nothing an account produces may ever reach a third party — would make every consultant who drafts a document with Claude and sends it to a client a violator. No provider markets its product that way, and none enforces it that way.

4 · Which machine you work on is your decision

You connect your subscription to a workspace that is yours, and work happens in it. Whether that workspace is a laptop, a desktop under a desk, or a cloud workstation you rent is a question about where the work happens, not about who is doing it. Renting the machine does not transfer the account, and no clause in either provider's terms reserves the choice of hardware to the provider.

This is also the answer to the automation clause. Automated access is prohibited “except when you are accessing our Services via an Anthropic API Key or where we otherwise explicitly permit it” — and the provider's own first-party coding client is exactly that explicit permission. A seller running the provider's own tool in their own workspace is doing the thing the tool was published to do.

The infrastructure an account holder chooses is theirs to choose. Shaidle operates that infrastructure on their behalf under an authorisation they grant and can withdraw at any time, in the same way a hosting provider, a CI runner or a managed workstation does. That is a service relationship with the account holder — not a second person using the account.

5 · The output belongs to the account holder

The consumer terms assign the account holder all of the provider's right, title and interest in the Outputs, and the commercial terms say the Customer owns its Outputs. Neither assignment carries a non-commercial limitation, a personal-use limitation, or any restriction on delivering the result to a client. Selling your own work product is not reselling somebody else's service — it is the ordinary use of a professional tool.

6 · Capped cost recovery, not an arbitrage margin

A seat on the exchange can recover at most 65% of the provider's list price for what it serves. The ceiling is enforced when earnings settle, and a seat that reaches it stops being schedulable. The economic consequence is that nobody can buy access cheaply and sell it dearly — the ceiling makes the trade impossible before it makes it unattractive.

We state plainly what this argument is and is not. A capped recovery goes to motive, characterisation and damages; it is not, by itself, a licence, and we do not lead with it. It sits here because it is true and because it is the difference between a person recovering part of a bill and a business running an arbitrage.

7 · Nothing is circumvented

Capacity is measured with the provider's own metric before it is listed. No quota is exceeded and no limit is evaded: one seat consumes one seat's worth of capacity, which is what the provider sold. On the API lane, tokens are bought at list price, so volume routed through the exchange is revenue for the provider rather than a leak around it.

What the platform enforces

The argument above is ours to make. These are facts about the codebase, enforced on the server rather than described in an interface:

• A buyer never receives a provider credential. Credentials are encrypted and opened in memory for one request at a time.
• A buyer cannot address a provider account. Which account serves a request is the scheduler's decision.
• Supply is Claude and Codex. Anything else is refused when an account is connected, not hidden in the interface.
• A seat recovers at most 65% of the provider's list price, and a seat that reaches its cap stops being scheduled.
• The account holder is notified every time their capacity serves a request, with the model, the tokens and the amount.
• Request and response bodies are relayed, not retained. What is kept is the accounting.

If your provider asks

Account holders occasionally get a note asking about activity on their account. Here is a statement of the position, written to be sent as it is. Read it before you use it: it is your account and your name on it.

Before you connect an account

Shaidle does not provide, transfer, or resell AI accounts. Shaidle provides a marketplace for authorised AI service capacity while account ownership and control remain with the supplier. Connecting a seat does not change that, and nothing below qualifies it.

Providers may suspend or terminate an account at their discretion, and an enforcement decision may depend on the provider's interpretation of its own terms and on the circumstances of use. That decision lands on the account holder rather than on Shaidle, and Shaidle cannot control or determine how a third-party provider reads its own terms. This is true of every account and every provider, and we say it here rather than leaving you to find out.

• Do not list an account you cannot afford to lose access to.
• Do not list an employer's account, a shared account, or an account you do not control yourself.
• You can stop at any time: drain mode ends new work immediately and lets in-flight work finish.
• Shaidle cannot indemnify you against a provider's enforcement decision, and does not pretend otherwise.

If that is not a trade-off you want to make, buy capacity here instead of selling it. The buyer side carries none of it.