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What an Account Is For

Linkly AI is a local-first application: your documents, your index, and your searches all happen on your own computer. The account plays no part in any of that. It does exactly one thing — connect you to Linkly AI’s official cloud services. Concretely, the account is the credential for three cloud capabilities:

Official AI Models

No provider keys to apply for — sign in and use them in the Chatbot

Cloud Libraries

Push a local library to the cloud so it’s online around the clock, and link libraries other people share

Remote Access

Let online AI like ChatGPT and Claude.ai reach back into your machine and read your documents
Everything else needs no account at all.

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What Works Without Signing In

This is the product’s baseline, and it’s written into the app under Settings → Data Privacy → What we don’t do:
No mandatory sign-in; client capabilities don’t depend on cloud services.
Capabilities that need no account and no internet connection whatsoever: In other words: install it, never sign in, and Linkly AI is still a complete local knowledge engine — indexing your files and answering retrieval calls from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other local AI tools over MCP, with nothing going online and nothing uploaded.
On the sign-in screen of the first-run wizard there’s a line of small print at the bottom: If you’ll use it offline, you can skip sign-in, but you’ll need to set up the AI models and other settings yourself — choose carefully. Click skip sign-in and you go straight into the app. You can sign in later at any time under Settings → Account.
The one thing you’ll have to supply yourself is a chat model: without signing in there are no official models, so you need to add a third-party provider’s API key under Settings → AI, or connect a local model.

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What Signing In Unlocks

Once you’re signed in, Linkly Official under Settings → AI lights up on its own. The model list is delivered by the server and there are no keys for you to fill in. Free accounts get our curated basic models (the more cost-effective flash tier); Pro additionally unlocks the frontier models. See Model Service for details.
Create cloud libraries on the web, push local content to them from the desktop app, link libraries other people share, and invite people to yours or publish it openly. The full walkthrough is in Using Cloud Libraries.
Builds a tunnel between your machine and mcp.linkly.ai so cloud-hosted AI applications like ChatGPT and Claude.ai can read the documents on your computer. Requires a Pro subscription; configuration is covered in Remote Access.
Signing in is what lets you manage API keys and review usage and quota in the dashboard. See API Keys below.

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Pages in the Web Dashboard

The avatar menu in the top-right corner also holds: Edit Profile, Invitations, My subscription (Pro) or Upgrade to Pro, Help center, and Sign Out.

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How to Sign In

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On the Web

Go to linkly.ai and click sign in. Take your pick of four methods, none of which involves setting a password:
  • Google account authorization
  • GitHub account authorization
  • Notion account authorization
  • Email code: enter your address and receive a one-time code by email
Your first sign-in is your registration; there’s no separate sign-up flow.

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On the Desktop

The desktop app leads with browser authorization — no keys for you to shuttle around by hand:
1

Open account settings

Go to Settings → Account and click Sign In.
2

Authorize in your browser

Your default browser opens Linkly AI’s authorization page (OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, requesting only the openid email scopes). The app shows Waiting for browser authorization… in the meantime, and you can click Cancel at any point.
3

Return to the app automatically

Once authorization completes, the browser brings the app back to the foreground and the account card shows your email address and Connected to Linkly AI Cloud. In the background the app also fetches the official model list — go back to the Chatbot and the models are there to pick.
No browser available, or working on a server or in a remote environment? At the bottom of the account page there’s a collapsed section, Optional: connect your account by setting an API key manually. Paste in the lkai_ key from the dashboard and the result is equivalent to signing in over OAuth.
The first-run wizard includes the same sign-in step (step 1 of 2), going through the same OAuth flow.

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In the Browser Extension

The extension never requires a sign-in: open the side panel and you can extract a page, convert it to Markdown, preview it, and export it. Signing in is just an optional action on the toolbar.

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Setting a Username

A cloud library’s address looks like linkly.ai/<username>/<slug>, so the account needs a globally unique username.
  • When you need one: the first time you enter the web dashboard, an unskippable Complete your profile dialog asks for a Display Name and a Username; going straight to creating a cloud library asks for it too.
  • Where to set it: the avatar in the top-right corner of the dashboard → Edit Profile. The same dialog also lets you change your avatar and display name (the email address is read-only).
  • Format rules: 6–39 characters, lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens only, must start and end with a letter or digit, no consecutive hyphens, and platform-reserved words are off limits.
Once set, a username can’t be changed. It appears in the public address of every cloud library you own, so decide it once and get it right. Display name and avatar, by contrast, can be changed any time.

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Free and Pro

Linkly AI draws a clean line: all local capabilities are free, and what Pro buys is the cloud enhancements.
The exact numbers — the ceilings on the three model quota windows, how many cloud libraries you can create and link, the document limit per library — are whatever the website and the in-app quota panel say. They shift as the product is tuned, and hard-coding them into the docs would only mislead.
A few things that are easy to mix up:
  • Cloud library search is open to free accounts, just with a smaller quota. What’s genuinely Pro-only is remote access (the tunnel) — on that path a free account gets an upgrade prompt straight away.
  • Inviting other people to your own library doesn’t need Pro. A library created on a free account can only be Private, but you can still invite readers by email from the library settings page → Sharing. Only publishing openly (Public / Showcase) needs Pro.
  • A library someone shares with you doesn’t count against your creation quota, only against one link slot.
  • The official models draw on a shared quota pool, different models consume it at different multipliers, and filling any one of the three time windows gets you rate-limited. Check what’s left in real time with the Model quota button at the bottom of the sidebar in the app, or on the dashboard home page. See Model Service for details.
Exceeding a quota doesn’t affect what’s already there — libraries you’ve built and documents you’ve pushed stay put; you just can’t create anything new. Quotas refresh per window automatically, with nothing to request.

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Subscribing and Cancelling

  • Upgrading: go to the website and click Subscribe Now to check out through Stripe. The Chinese interface additionally offers One-time payment (Alipay / WeChat Pay) — valid for 1 year, no auto-renewal, repurchase when it expires.
  • Cancelling: the avatar in the top-right corner of the dashboard → My subscription takes you to the Stripe management page to cancel. Your benefits remain active until the end of the current billing period.
  • A 7-day full refund, no questions asked is supported.

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API Keys

An API key is your account’s stand-in on the command line and in third-party tools, formatted as lkai_ plus 32 hexadecimal characters (37 in total). Where to get one: dashboard → Integrations → the API Keys section → New Key. The name can be left blank. What it’s for: A few facts about keys:
  • One key per account is enough. Signing in on the desktop creates (or reuses) one for you automatically; the web dashboard disables the New Key button once you already have one.
  • It isn’t shown only once. The key is masked in the list by default — click the eye icon to reveal it in full at any time, and the copy icon to copy it.
  • It never expires by default, unless you revoke it yourself.
  • It can be revoked: click the trash icon and confirm. The key stops working immediately, and you simply create a new one.
An API key is equivalent to your account credentials — it can reach your cloud libraries, and with the tunnel open it can read the documents on your own machine. Don’t commit it to a public repository, paste it into a chat, or leave it in a screenshot. If you suspect it has leaked, revoke it in the dashboard and create a new one right away.

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Accounts and Security

  • Signing out (desktop): Settings → Account → Sign Out, with a confirmation step. It only clears the credentials stored on this machine — your local index, local libraries, chat history, and anything already pushed to the cloud are all untouched.
  • Signing out is not the same as revoking a key: the API key on the server remains valid. To invalidate it for good (a lost computer, a leaked key), you have to revoke it in the dashboard.
  • Where credentials live: on the desktop, in config.json inside the app data directory; for the CLI, in ~/.linkly/credentials.json. Both are local files, and keys are redacted automatically in the app logs.
  • Deleting your account: there’s no self-service option yet — contact us through the support page and we’ll take care of it.

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FAQ

Three things: the official AI models, cloud libraries, and remote access. Local indexing, local search, and the local MCP service are all unaffected. If you already have your own model API key and only use Linkly AI from AI tools on this machine (Claude Code, Cursor, and the like), there’s genuinely no need to register.
No. Indexing and search always happen on your machine. Only when you deliberately push a library to the cloud does that library’s content get uploaded; and with remote access on, the tunnel only forwards requests and responses — it stores no documents. See the privacy section of the FAQ for details.
There’s no device limit. Each computer goes through the OAuth sign-in once, and they all share the same API key. Do note that cloud library link slots are counted per account (1 on Free, 99 on Pro), not per device.
Not for the time being — it’s part of the public address of your cloud libraries. If you got it wrong, contact us through the support page on the website. Display name and avatar aren’t subject to this and can be changed any time.
It means this computer has no cloud credentials stored yet. Go to Settings → Account, click Sign In, and run through the browser authorization once. If you’re already signed in and still see it, the key has most likely been revoked or expired — the account card will read This sign-in is invalid or the key has expired., and signing in again overwrites the old key.
Yes. Signing out only deletes the credentials on this machine; cloud content is entirely unaffected and reappears once you sign back in. To delete the cloud copy you have to do it explicitly on the web, under the library settings page → Danger zone.
Quota refreshes automatically per time window, with nothing to apply for — it comes back on its own. If you often find it too tight, add a third-party model provider under Settings → AI as well; third-party and local models don’t consume Linkly AI quota.

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Further reading