Key Terms
Agent, workflow, Secure Vault — the three terms you'll encounter on indie.money, what they mean, and how they relate.
Written By pvdyck
Last updated About 3 hours ago
Key Terms
Three words appear throughout indie.money. Here's exactly what each one means and when you'll see it.
Quick Reference
Agent
An agent is an automation you can purchase and run on indie.money.
Agents appear on the marketplace with a name, description, per-run price, and success rate. After purchase, you own the agent as an NFT and can run it whenever you need it.
- Producers browse, buy, and run agents.
- Builders publish agents to earn money per run.
Workflow
A workflow is the n8n automation definition behind an agent — a JSON or YAML file containing nodes, connections, and logic.
Builders create workflows in n8n and upload them to indie.money. Once published, a workflow becomes an agent on the marketplace.
Coming from n8n? Your n8n workflow is your agent here. The nodes, connections, and logic you built in n8n are exactly what runs when a Producer clicks Run. Nothing is converted or re-implemented — it executes as-is on an n8n-compatible engine.
The two terms describe the same thing from different perspectives: workflow is how Builders think about what they build; agent is how Producers think about what they buy.
Secure Vault
The Secure Vault is where API credentials are stored — encrypted, access-controlled, and never exposed to Builders, other Producers, or the platform.
When you connect an API key (OpenAI, Slack, Salesforce, etc.), it goes into the Secure Vault. Credentials are decrypted only at execution time, only inside the isolated execution environment.
See Credentials System Deep Dive for the full security model.