Own and Trust Your Workflow

You own your workflow

When you acquire a workflow as a Producer, you own your instance of it. Ownership is held by you, it's transferable, and it isn't locked to the platform.

That ownership is recorded as a transferable ownership token tied to your deployed workflow. If you want to hand the workflow off to someone else, you can transfer it. Your workflow is an asset you control, not a seat you rent.

You stay in control of credentials

Most automations need to talk to other services on your behalf — your email, your spreadsheet, your CRM. indie.money handles those connections through the Secure Vault, so your keys are stored securely and used only to run your workflow.

You get three ways to provide credentials, and you choose which one fits:

Where the Builder has not connected a key, yours is used — so you keep control of everything they left open, and your key is billed by your provider directly rather than through the workflow.

Where the Builder has connected one, theirs is used and the workflow shows that credential as locked. That is deliberate: the Builder priced and tested the workflow against their own key, and on workflows that include AI usage in the price it is the key funding every run.

Platform-provided keys are not offered on every workflow. A workflow that offers freetrials, or whose Builder includes AI usage in the price, runs on its own connectedkeys — there is no platform fallback behind it, because nobody is funding thatusage. Such a workflow will not run until those keys are connected.

Configured credentials stay attached to the workflow instance. If you transfer the workflow, those credentials transfer with it unless you revoke them at the external provider first.

Settled is settled {#settled-is-settled}

Once a run settles, the builder's payout is final: nothing on the platform can pull a paid-out amount back. Card deposits follow card rules before they are spent, so that finality starts at settlement, not at top-up.

Why this matters

Ownership and credential control are what make a workflow something you can actually depend on for your business. You're not building on rented ground: you own the workflow, you decide whose keys it runs on while you hold the NFT, and you can transfer the whole working instance when you sell it. For transfer details, read What Transfers When You Sell Your Workflow. To see how this fits the bigger picture, read Why indie.money.