Disclosure

What you're agreeing to.

Vinculum asks two things that most software doesn't: that your machine may run work sent by strangers, and that your questions may be answered on theirs. Everything below follows from those two facts. Last updated 13 August 2026.

If you lend a machine

You can read the prompts you serve: The weights run on your hardware, so the text passes through it in the clear. That is how local inference works, not a gap we intend to close on this side — and it is the same fact stated the other way in "If you ask a question" below.
Your machine sets its own limits: Safe-for-work by default. Anything beyond it is opt-in, per machine, and off until you turn it on. Content that is clearly illegal is blocked for everyone, everywhere, and no setting turns that off.
Serving costs electricity: Inference uses the hardware you are lending. Sharing is off until you switch it on, and switching it off takes effect on the current job.
Work is spot-checked: The hub seeds known-answer probes into the job stream. A machine that returns junk loses credits, and a machine that keeps doing it loses its place in the network.

If you ask a question

A network reply ran on someone else's computer: Whoever served it could read what you sent. Don't put secrets in one. Every reply in the app is tagged with where it ran, so this is never ambiguous after the fact.
Local Mode is the private option: Replies run on your own machine and nothing leaves it. It is free, it does not expire, and it works with no network at all.
It is slower than a commercial API: Queue waits and consumer hardware are the price of a network nobody pays for. There is no service level, and there is no promise that a given model is available at a given moment.
The network is small: The counter on the front page is the live number reported by the hub, not a projection. Early means slow.

Credits

Credits are how the network keeps score between people who give compute and people who use it. That is the whole of it.

Credits have no cash value and cannot be transferred, sold, or withdrawn.
Earning credits is not income. Lending a machine is a contribution, not a job.
The free tier stays free. Earning by contributing always works, and Local Mode never closes.
If credits are ever sold, money buys queue priority — never features — and part of it pays out to the machines that served the work.

What we hold

Your identity is a keypair: Generated on your machine on first run. No email, no account, no signup. Credits attach to the key, which also means that losing it loses them.
This site collects nothing: No cookies, no analytics, no third-party scripts, no fonts fetched from anyone else. The front page makes one request — asking the hub how many machines are online.
The waitlist is an address and a date: An address and the date it arrived. No name, no IP, no tracking identifier — there is nowhere in the record to put one. It is used for a single email when the app is ready, and is not shared with anyone.

This page describes Vinculum as it is being built, and will be updated as that changes rather than quietly left behind. Questions about anything here are welcome — leave an address and ask.